Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep, Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House) has offered an update on his film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck. He has completed post-production on the film, and one of its stars, David Dastmalchian, has offered his thoughts on the film.

Dastmalchian said of the film: “It’s beautiful. You think, ‘Oh, Mike Flanagan, Stephen King, this thing’s going to just be the most horrifying, terrifying, thing you’ve ever seen.’ [But] it is so beautifully rendered, heartfelt, the drama, the performances,” gushed Late Night with the Devil star Dastmalchian in a new interview with Gizmodo. 

He continued: “The cast in this is deep. [Matthew] Lillard has a moment in this film that just breaks my heart. Karen Gillan, another one who I think rides that incredible ski slope between her small indie art films and then big studio budgeted things. One of the best actors in Hollywood right now. Kate Siegel, I mean there’s so [many] great people! Ah, what a joy.”

The movie is based on the short story from King’s 2020 anthology If It Bleeds, “The Life of Chuck is three separate stories linked to tell the biography of Charles Krantz in reverse, beginning with his death from a brain tumor at 39 and ending with his childhood in a supposedly haunted house.”

According to the production, the project will draw tonally from Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

Karen Gillan, one of the stars of the movie, saw a rough cut of it, and previously said that it had her “crying for days.”

The actress explained: “You know what, it didn’t feel that different. I was going into it like, ‘OK, how has he changed? He’s done so many movies. [It] felt the same! We were back in Alabama like we’d never left. If there was any difference, I suppose he just felt more… I mean, he was relaxed on the first one, but maybe he wasn’t, he was just pretending to be relaxed. But no, he was just the same Mike Flanagan, and brilliant and the movie is absolutely incredible. I saw a not-finished version of it, and literally didn’t stop crying for days. In a good way.”

The movie also stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange), and Jacob Tremblay (Doctor Sleep), as well as Mia Sara, Matthew Lillard, Trinity Bliss, Harvey Guillen, Rahul Kohli, David Dastmalchian, and Heather Langenkamp.

This is one of might most anticipated upcoming film projects, and I’m very excited to see how Flanagan tells this story.

Source: Letterboxd / Gizmodo