“I Assume You Know About California”: The 2025 Movie Scene I Can’t Get Out of My Head

Just as there was a monster at the end of a beloved famous children’s book, there’s a spoiler at the beginning of this piece and there’s no real way of getting around it. So if you haven’t seen The Life of Chuck and don’t want to learn about its central mystery—which I tried my best to dance around in my review back in June and is really more of a core concept than a twist and knowing it doesn’t really ruin the experience of watching the film—then maybe bookmark this piece, go play Cinematrix or something, and come back once you’ve seen the movie. It’s good, and though it likely won’t end up on my list of 2025’s very best films, it has moments I can’t stop thinking about, one scene in particular.

Charles Krantz is dying at the age of 39, but the people who live in his head don’t understand that. Like the Stephen King novella it adapts, Mike Flanagan’s Life of Chuck unfolds across three segments told in reverse chronological order. The first, titled “Act Three: Thanks Chuck,” takes place as the end nears for Charles (Chuck to his friends). But instead of scenes from Chuck’s deathbed, which Flanagan restrains from featuring until just before the segment’s end, the film stages an internal drama of collapse as a more widespread, and sometimes chillingly plausible, global meltdown as seen from the perspective of an nondescript 2020s American community. Despite its author’s long association with the genre, The Life of Chuck is not a horror movie. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have horror nestled within it, however.