In one sense, The Life of Chuck is timely. With its depiction of the “last times,” Mike Flanagan’s apocalyptic drama (rated R for language) reflects a real cultural sense that the end is near. Whether by climate catastrophe, global pandemic, depopulation crisis, AI superintelligence exterminating all humans, or geopolitical fragility finally cracking in the sort of nuclear scenario Annie Jacobsen depicts, potential causes of doom are mounting.

Based on a Stephen King novella, The Life of Chuck—which tells its story in reverse—taps into this anxiety by starting with a depiction of the end of the universe. The apocalyptic vision feels disturbingly relevant and unsettling. Yet how the film wrestles with meaning in light of impending destruction is less relevant.

With its feet planted squarely (if shakily) on the ground of materialistic atheism, Chuck is out of sync with the metamodern zeitgeist. It feels more like a relic of the aughts heyday of New Atheism than a product of the present vibe shift. King’s novella is good fodder for post-Christian auteur Flanagan’s sensibility—and the movie might appeal to deconstructed believers, hardened agnostics, and other cynics. But at a time when secularization is slowing, religious interest is rising among young people, and books are being written about the surprising rebirth of belief in God, a movie like this probably won’t resonate widely. That’s a good thing.

Just Dance

How do we make sense of our painfully brief existence? What’s the point of being alive, knowing we’ll soon not be alive? These are the questions Chuck ponders, made urgent by the film’s setting in the final days of the cosmos.

The movie’s opening act (“Act 3: Thanks Chuck”) follows schoolteacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in an idyllic small American town as he comes to realize the world is ending. First, it’s weeks of global catastrophes: breaking news about fires engulfing entire Midwestern states, volcanoes in Germany, wars between India and Pakistan, most of California falling into the ocean, massive sinkholes swallowing up entire highways. Then the already spotty internet goes down for good, followed by the electrical grid. Suicides skyrocket and divorced people reconnect with exes just for the comfort of being with a familiar someone in scary times. Soon, planets and stars start exploding. It becomes clear Earth will soon follow suit.

Meanwhile, a mysterious name keeps popping up on billboards, radio and TV ads, skywriting, and graffiti: Chuck Krantz, an accountant dying of a brain tumor at age 39. As it ends, the world mysteriously coalesces around a message of gratitude toward this singular, unknown life (“Thanks, Chuck! 39 Great Years!”). It’s a comical coping mechanism for humanity’s collective expiration. #ThanksChuck is “our last meme,” as Marty puts it.

The Life of Chuck is out of sync with the metamodern zeitgeist. It feels more like a relic of the aughts heyday of New Atheism than a product of the present vibe shift.

Act 2 (“Buskers Forever”) goes back in time a year or so and introduces us to Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) shortly before he learns he has incurable cancer. We meet him as he walks home from work in his accountant’s suit, briefcase in hand. He passes a busking drummer and spontaneously breaks into dance.

“Why did Chuck stop and dance?” narrator Nick Offerman ponders. “He doesn’t know. And would answers make a good thing better?” That line encapsulates the film’s worldview. What do we do with suffering, death, evil, and other hard questions? The film’s suggestion: Just dance when you can and live life while you have it. Embrace music-making encounters in the street. Delight in the quirky unpredictability of the world, but don’t expect answers.

The film ends with Act 1, (“I Contain Multitudes”), which narrates Chuck’s tragic childhood as he’s orphaned at a young age and raised by kind grandparents. Faced with death at every turn, including a foreshadowing of his own untimely death at 39, young Chuck develops a mantra for embracing life’s brevity: “I will live my life until my life runs out.”

Is Math the ‘Only Truth’?

With frequent nods to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and a kind of “dance while you can!” joie de vivre as a coping mechanism, Chuck faces finitude with a wistful blend of Romantic nihilism.

The film is heavy-handed in the motifs it returns to again and again. Carl Sagan’s “cosmic calendar” figures prominently, as do allusions to math as the “only truth” that “can’t lie.” “Stars are just math,” Chuck’s grandfather tells him. “The universe is just one big equation.” There’s no transcendence. No cosmic telos. No hope. Just math: equations, probabilities, theorems.

To be sure, there’s mystery in the film’s story. Seemingly supernatural events occur. Yet presumably, these are just phenomena explainable by equations science hasn’t cracked yet. It’s a perspective close to that of Christopher Nolan, whose films are constantly depicting “magic” that’s simply futuristic science.

In this movie, as with Flanagan’s Netflix series—Midnight Mass (2021) and The Midnight Club (2022)—God isn’t believed in, but he’s wrestled with. Good people suffering, orphans, cancer: How does one cope with life’s horrors? One way is to question or blame God—even a God you don’t believe exists.

Why Did God Make Us?

At one point in Chuck, the narrator describes how Chuck’s final months will play out as his terminal disease destroys him:

[He will] enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

The narrator is referring to the Act 2 moment when Chuck starts dancing in the street to the beat of a busker’s drum. It’s the movie’s centerpiece and its anchor of existential meaning: a fleeting experience of profound human connection, a sensation of being “fully alive.”

Is this the extent of life’s meaning? Ephemeral moments of joy, kindness, and connection with fellow clumps of rotting meat? This seems to be where Chuck lands. Since there’s no meaning beyond this life, simply living your life is the most meaning you can muster. This echoes a sentiment we hear elsewhere in secular pop culture, as when a character in The White Lotus says, “I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning. Because time gives it meaning.”

I suspect these answers don’t satisfy the majority. A philosophical hallowing of “time” might be a way committed atheists cope with death, but it’s a luxury belief of the elite, not a viable existential framework for most people. Your average person doesn’t want to just “run out the clock” and isn’t convinced “being kind to one another” is the main point of life. Where do we get the criteria for what “kindness” looks like anyway? Or a convincing reason why kindness matters if we’re all going to be dust particles soon anyway?

Better Story

The present vibe shift across the Western world—a fervor for spiritual experience generally and a renewed appreciation for Christianity specifically—is evidence that in the face of dizzying change and doomsday fears, humans gravitate to higher truth. We understand our need for a Redeemer. We cannot muster meaning or purpose from within ourselves. They’re bestowed on us from our Creator.

In the face of dizzying change and doomsday fears, humans gravitate to higher truth.

Thankfully, we don’t have to shrug at the unknowability of some complex math in the universe that might explain why we’re here. We have a self-revealing God who told us who he is, why we’re here, and what everything is moving toward. Truth, goodness, beauty, sacrifice, love, life, death, and pain make sense in light of this God. That’s what more and more restless, disillusioned late-moderns are coming to realize.

We don’t dance because life is meaningless and the end is near. We dance because God is good and eternal life can be ours, in Christ. That’s the story that rings true.