I understand why the film was somewhat polarising, as it’s not for the cynical or those with poor attention spans (seems to be a good chunk of the audience these days). I think the themes are very relatable and can be very inspiring for most people, but that does rely on not knowing too much about them going in as they have been explored many times before. I have always found the concept of death terrifying, so I found The Life of Chuck to be very effecting (similar to the long monologues in Midnight Mass). I think perhaps part of the reason why I found it so moving right in this moment is because my grandparents are getting very close to the ends of their lives and just recently I attended the funeral of a friend who died very young in a freak accident. The film forced me to think about mortality which is a topic I so often try to prevent my brain from lingering on, particularly these days as death seems to be all around me.

I did have a couple of nitpicks. Firstly, Nick Offerman as the narrator. I think he has a great voice for narrating and his performance was good, but I’m not sure if his voice was the right match for this particular film. He has a very dry comedic tone to his voice, which worked well in a couple of scenes but was jarring for the majority. Initially I didn’t like the narration at all, but on reflection I think it was important to make the story more abstract. If you don’t have a narrator, you need to show and tell more through conversations and behaviours involving the characters, which adds a level of realism that would have worked against the film’s messaging; the characters in this film are deliberately underdeveloped, allowing us to replace them with ourselves. The excessive explanations did dumb things down, but after seeing how many people online didn’t understand the film at all, even with a narrator hitting them over the head constantly, I feel like it was worth it for accessibility.

Speaking of dumbing the film down, the ghost story twist at the end was too literal. I prefer to think of that scene as a visual representation of an existential crisis. For a young Chuck in his late teens, maybe that is the first time it has really dawned on him that death is coming for him at an unspecified time in the future and that he only has a limited time left before that happens. That’s a very relatable fear/realisation that many of us grapple with throughout our lives, including in old age as Chuck’s grandfather did. Upon entering the attic, they didn’t actually have visions of the exact moment of their death; it was just a combination of age, reflecting on the passing of loved ones and the emptiness and silence of the space that forced them to contemplate their own mortality. I think this better emphasises the choice we all have to take risks in the pursuit of living our lives to their fullest, fully aware that our time is limited, or playing it safe and closing ourselves off from opportunities for short-term joy because we are so focused on a long-term, almost infinite, approach to life.