Life of Chuck review: TIFF Peoples Choice winner is tedious sap

Running time: 110 minutes.Not yet rated.“Life is very long,” wrote T.S.

Eliot.So is “The Life of Chuck,” horror maestro Mike Flanagan’s sap-fest that premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival. Based on Stephen King’s not-at-all-scary short story, the one-note tale unfolds backwards in three soupy parts, and is narrated by Nick Offerman like a lumberjack Dr.Seuss.The first, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a schoolteacher named Marty who is contending with the oncoming apocalypse, is so conspicuously bad you figure there must be a method to its messiness. And there is, but the twist that explains away this confounding world only ups the film’s quality from awful to fine. At the start, there is a religion-meets-sci-fi vibe not unlike “The Leftovers,” only lesser, and a natural-disaster doom à la “The Day After Tomorrow.” The east and west coasts have been subsumed by the oceans, the Midwest is on fire and the internet is down.

Still, people mindlessly commute to work and school, circumnavigating sinkholes, because they don’t know what else to do. Flanagan mines some gallows humor out of the crumbling planet.At a parent-teacher conference with Marty, a shattered man mourns the loss of PornHub.Ejiofor is, rightly, in a state of emotional paralysis as Marty — guzzling hard liquor at home and spouting off philosophical, mathematical mumbo-jumbo on the phone to his ex-wife.

Knowing the end is nigh, he goes off in search of her.But everywhere Marty wanders he finds mysterious billboards, radio spots and TV commercials saying, “Charles Krantz, 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” Who buys ads at the end of the world? So, the main question of the darkly comic Part One — other than “What time is it?” — is “Who is Chuck?”The second, music-driven chapter peels away at that unknown.That’s when we finally meet Chuck (an unmemorable Tom Hiddleston), a ho-hum businessman traveling on a work trip to a bland town that...