‘The Life of Chuck’ is a very schmaltzy film, full of characters spouting Carl Sagan–style truisms with great seriousness. The tone is strange: part end-of-the-world gravitas, part whimsical platitudes about how we should respond to catastrophe, and at times the film seems to instruct the audience on what to think, weighing the apocalypse against inconveniences like, as one character puts it, not being able to access online porn because the internet is down.

The story contains odd, slightly surreal moments, such as a school parents’ evening led by a schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) where a father is baffled by his lack of concern over the internet outage, wondering why he insists on talking about his daughter instead of the bigger disaster unfolding. This is emblematic of the film’s smug, self-congratulatory streak. It wears its life-affirming philosophy proudly, with posters declaring it ‘It’s a Wonderful Life for today’, while its pseudo-profound philosophy boils down to ‘make the most of every moment.’

Adapted from a Stephen King short story, it asks: if you knew your life was ending, could you, like in the Book of Ecclesiastes, find closure? Two of the central characters are a divorced couple who, in the face of the end, discover their destinies are still bound together. People are dying, but magically they’re also enjoying life more than ever – a sentimental conceit the film fully embraces.

Ejiofor’s character appears in different timelines, the same teacher in the same school both decades earlier and in the present day. The people we meet as the world ends also turn up in Chuck’s youth – at a school disco, for example. We get hints that Chuck’s life may not have been extraordinary, and when he’s diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he begins connecting the dots. The apocalypse may be happening entirely in his head, in the form of a mental theatre collapsing in on itself.

The film asks: if the world were ending, who would you want beside you? It’s meant to be about family, fulfilling dreams, and seizing the moment, but the effect can feel vapid. The dialogue is often heartfelt but it is undermined by a clunky script.

Chuck himself is an enigma, first glimpsed in billboards as the world falls apart, then seen in his prime a month before illness strikes – an ordinary man, dancing in the street on his way to work as an accountant. The film eventually takes us further back to his childhood, where he dances in his grandmother’s kitchen to 1980s hits like Wang Chung’s Dance Hall Days. The suggestion is that the apocalypse is a metaphor for Chuck’s dying mind. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why strangers see his face on their broken TV screens, reciting greeting-card wisdom about life.

The film’s message seems to be that even seemingly unremarkable lives hold extraordinary potential, and that perhaps each of us is the centre of our own universe. It echoes Ecclesiastes’ reminder that life might not make sense, but that joy and wonder are still possible.

Because it’s Stephen King, there’s also a mystical element: a top-floor portal guarded by Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill), who warns him not to enter because of the ghosts inside. The structure is elliptical and non-linear, mixing fantasy flourishes with the bittersweet surrealism of ‘Amélie’. But, whereas initially, the film felt condescending and hollow to me, over time it weaved a strange magic.