Based on a short story by Stephen King , Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck begins as a disaster movie, though not the kind one might expect from a guy like King. Early on, we hear news of a magnitude 9.1 earthquake splintering off a huge chunk of California into the Pacific, just the latest in a series of worldwide calamities. But amid the worries about bridge collapses and floods and species extinction and famine, a teacher named Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) primarily spends his time trying to calm his students and their parents about the fact that the internet is down. “The library’s still here,” he tells them with a playfully snide matter-of-factness that wins us over to his side.

This isn’t thriller territory; it’s frog-in-boiling-water territory. People go about their days w

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