Hopefully many years from now, when someone is trying to sum up Mike Flanagan’s career, they could likely crib the mantra from his sweet, introspective and entirely odd 2024 effort The Life of Chuck. Based on the Stephen King novella, the film heavily utilizes Walt Whitman’s famous line from his poem Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Although enshrined as a horror writer/director, Flanagan has also long contained multitudes. Like King, who has exerted a considerable influence over Flanagan’s career, the filmmaker’s work has often oscillated between foreboding doom and gloom and sensitive, life-affirming humanism to great effect. The Life of Chuck is no different, providing another rich, distinctive look at the terror and wonder of being human.

Told in reverse chronological order across three acts, the film opens with act three. This section depicts perhaps one of the quietest apocalypses ever captured on film. While there are earthquakes, crop failures and, most distressingly by far, Pornhub outages to deal with, most of this takes place in the background or on TV screens.

The characters we follow, including schoolteacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his doctor ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gilan) and his neighbor Gus (Matthew Lillard) react to reports of this devastation by calmly muddling through their lives and trying to make sense of it all. And there is indeed a lot to process. In addition to all the disasters, cryptic billboards and TV ads have begun popping up all over the place thanking someone named Charles “Chuck” Krantz for “39 great years.”

The Life of Chuck then switches tracks to a storyline where the apocalypse hasn’t happened or at least hasn’t happened yet. The film presents two acts in, well, the life of Chuck, a bespectacled accountant orphaned at a young age and raised by his grandparents Sarah and Albie Krantz (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, respectively).

Chuck is played by Tom “Loki” Hiddleston as an adult and three young actors as a child. While the narrative connections between acts three and two and one aren’t immediately clear, the thematic ones sure are. Like Marty, Felicia and Gus, Chuck’s journey is, in part, defined by existential dread. In act two, that manifests in the character facing middle-age malaise, whereas in act one, it revolves around a series of losses the character suffers early in life.

Existential concerns are of course quintessential Flanagan. All of his projects have characters struggling with death in one form or another. The way The Life of Chuck explores this topic also includes many of the director’s trademarks. It weaves in big topics like consciousness and time, all while featuring a large ensemble, flashbacks and forwards and, of course, plenty of monologues.

Eventually, Whitman’s multitudes emerge as the film’s dramatic nexus and answer to how we deal with such suffering. Although it’s left somewhat vague, the general idea is that we all have a rich inner life and multiplicity of selves formed by our consciousness. This inner world reflects everything we see and everything we learn and grows larger every year of our existence.

Chuck first reveals his multitudes in act two. The character is on break from a banking conference he’s attending and suddenly breaks into a jig to the beats coming from a street busker. Chuck’s dancing displays a level of talent that doesn’t match his buttoned-up, stuffed-shirt appearance. We later learn in act one that Chuck had been taught to dance by his grandmother, and even once wanted to pursue it professionally. Recalling this buried talent later in life not only seems to break Chuck out of his mid-life melancholy but uplift the spirits of those around him as well.

While this scene is really fun, with Hiddleston’s athleticism and charm on full blast, it will likely induce major eye rolling for some. And I totally get it. The idea of returning to a past life as a hoofer as a way to deal with existential fears seems laughable on the surface. If you get ass cancer, for example, no amount of fancy footwork is going to save you. Even if you have the support of choreographer Mandy Moore, who once helped Gosling save jazz, your existence is likely destined to become a complete horror show.

Luckily for the film as a whole, Flanagan and company seem fully aware of this, and they never attempt to make Chuck’s multitudes into something they’re not. They never suggest for instance that multitudes can actually cure death anxiety. Instead, multitudes act more as a reminder that we are free to be anyone we want at any time. We don’t have to be defined by our jobs, our social roles or even our inevitable deaths, because our multitudes remind us how we’re less a single self than an amalgam of all things.

Furthermore, the film is clear that multitudes are largely a temporary answer to a permanent problem. Recalling his past life as a twinkle toe breaks Chuck out of his mid-life melancholy and uplifts others around him as well. Yet Hiddleston’s nimble performance deftly conveys how briefly the effect lasts. His marvelously expressive face, which had been bright and joyful during his dance, almost immediately switches back to melancholic brooding upon its conclusion.

We can see the same thing occur in act one, where Chuck first develops his multitudes. This act is mostly a warm, life-affirming depiction of someone finding wonder in their inner life amidst unfathomable loss. Sometimes it’s all a bit much, with Mia Sara’s Sarah, who initially teaches Chuck to dance, being an unfortunate example. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Mia Sara. I am so glad she returned to the screen after 13 years away, but she is given no real depth here. She comes across as an idealized projection than a real human.

She’s balanced out by Mark Hamill’s Albie. The veteran actor mostly characterizes Chuck’s grandpop in a kindly, folksy way that jives completely with Chuck’s successful journey of self-discovery. Yet he also imbues him with an underlying darkness. Burdened by loss and obsessed with a (possibly) haunted cupola, Albie’s presence reminds us that death remains a constant even for those lucky enough to find such internal attunement.

Figures like Albie reflect Flanagan’s own multitudes, which have long enabled him to tell life-affirming stories that don’t deny the often-difficult reality of being human. And they help The Life of Chuck avoid becoming facile, unrealistic paean about how journeyed inward can somehow obviate the terrifyingly temporal and lethal reality in which we are all forced to live. At best, The Life of Chuck advances the message that aligning with our multitudes can provide a balm or a salve. It’s a way to refocus our energies and our attentions not on our brevity but on the miraculous freedom afforded to us by our internal complexity.

That is a message that still matters, even if doesn’t substantively fix anything about our wretched state. As Lillard’s Gus says of the impending apocalypse early in act three, “The waiting. I think that’s the hardest part.” The Life of Chuck vividly explores just how difficult that can be for all of us. And though multitudes can’t change the fact we’re going to die, it argues compellingly that they can help us decide how to live.