Mike Flanagan’s Best Tearjerker Monologues

Mike Flanagan‘s new movie The Life of Chuck is one of the most idiosyncratic films to hit screens in some time. Based on the short story by Stephen King, The Life of Chuck has a strange, three-part narrative, all about the cosmic importance of one non-descriptive businessman named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). For fans of Flanagan’s work, The Life of Chuck is perfection. It breaks from the horror for which Flanagan and King are best known, but more than makes up for the change with endless, soulful monologues delivered by wonderful character actors, many of whom are members of Flanagan’s regular troupe.

Despite the fact that they rarely appeared in his first movies, including as only florid snippets of dialogue in his indie debut Absentia (2011) or his surprising overachiever Ouija: The Origin of Evil (2016), monologues have become Flanagan’s calling card. Long, poetic, and brimming with emotion, monologues are the reason that fans love (and detractors hate) Flanagan’s work. Which means that this is a perfect time to take a look back at some of the most notable examples of heartbreaking, tearjerking speeches in Mike Flanagan’s filmography.

A Dirty Joke (Gerald’s Game, 2017)

When it was first announced, a movie adaptation of the Stephen King short story Gerald’s Game seemed like a terrible idea. The story about a wife named Jessie getting chained to a bed and left alone in a remote hideaway after her husband dies of a heart attack mid-tryst, certainly is compelling, but it’s not at all visual.

Nowadays though it’s clear that Gerald’s Game is the quintessential Flanagan horror movie: one where Jessie’s (Carla Gugino) desperate situation after the death of Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) gives her opportunity to reflect on life. It also gives Flanagan, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Howard, the opportunity to shoot some monologues. The most heartbreaking of the bunch may be the first, delivered to Jessie by a vision of Gerald. The first of many visions and memories that will visit Jessie, this Gerald taunts her for losing her mind and for a fundamental lack of bravery. Manifesting her guilt over their troubled marriage, he blames her for failing to pay sufficient attention to him. As proof, the ghostly Gerald recalls a horrid sexist joke he once told a party, one that Jessie overheard and hated but lacked the courage to confront him about.

With that speech, Gerald manifests Jessie’s fear that she’s wasted her life—a life that may be about to end in the most ignoble way.

Confetti (The Haunting of Hill House, 2018)

For his first Netflix series, Flanagan takes the Shirley Jackson psychological horror classic, The House on Haunted Hill, and turns it into a tale of healing amongst a shattered family. Flanagan transforms the novel’s characters, originally unrelated participants in a paranormal experiment, into members of the Crain family, shattered after the suicide of their troubled mother (Gugino) and their father’s (Henry Thomas) mental breakdown.

Much of the series deals with the family coming together again after the death of their sister Nell (Victoria Pedretti), with plenty of flashbacks to the family falling apart in the titular haunted house. In the final episode, when they’re all back together for her funeral, Nell’s ghost arrives and urges them to stay together.

“I feel a bit clearer now. Everything’s been out of order,” the dead sibling states, explaining both the frightening appearance of her ghost in earlier episodes and the fractured nature of the narrative. More than an explanation, however, the nonlinear nature of the ghost’s existence relates to the messy nature of the characters’ lives: “Our moments fall around us like rain. Or the snow. Or confetti.” With that metaphor, Nell gives meaning to the fractious nature of the character’s lives, to the connections they have despite all the hurt. “I loved you completely. And you loved me same,” she tells them. “That’s all. The rest is confetti.”

The World is a Hungry Place (Doctor Sleep, 2019)

When Flanagan took on an adaptation of Doctor Sleep, he took on an impossible task. King may hate Stanley Kubrick‘s version of The Shining and thus wrote Doctor Sleep as a sequel to his 1977 novel, but everyone else loves the 1980 film. Thus Flanagan had to make a movie that somehow worked as a sequel to the novel and the film—a film filled with recognizable actors in iconic roles.

Opinions vary on the success of the theatrical cut of Doctor Sleep, but most agree that the Director’s Cut succeeds, in part because it feels less like a cash in on The Shining and more like a proper Flanagan work.

Nowhere is that more clear than in one of the scenes between the adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) and the ghost of Dick Hallorann, played by the great Carl Lumbly here. Riffing off the metaphor of hunger that the bitter Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) applied to his own family, Dick talks about the world as “a hungry place.” But instead of speaking out of resentment, Dick uses the world’s hunger to encourage Danny to help others, to use his gift to make the world a little less ravenous.

We Can’t Count on the Past (The Haunting of Bly Manor, 2020)

An adaptation of the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Bly Manor veers away from the horror of Flanagan’s other works and fully embraces openhearted drama. It’s fitting then that the best monologue in the series is really two monologues that become something of a dialogue, focusing on Bly Manor’s prim and proper housekeeper Mrs. Grose (T’Nia Miller) and the affable cook Owen Sharma (Rahul Kohli). Owen makes his attraction to Mrs. Grose known from the beginning, but the housekeeper is slow to reciprocate, paused by the memory of her abusive late husband and too practical to fully accept the dreamy Owen’s plan to go to Paris.

In the incredible fifth episode “The Altar of the Dead,” directed by Liam Gavin and written by Laurie Penny, we see what appear to be a series of flashbacks in Mrs. Grose’s life, including her first meeting to interview Owen. It’s there that Owen shares his experiences of caring for his dementia-stricken mother, which taught him that “we can’t count on the past.” Owen’s hopeful speech about unreliable memories and Mrs. Grose’s monologue about vulnerability intermingle into a tragic reveal about the latter’s heartbreaking fate.

My. Self. (Midnight Mass, 2021)

The story of a charismatic priest who confuses a vampire for an angel and returns to his island hometown with a renewed sense of mission, Midnight Mass is about both the beauty of faith and its ability to turn us into something monstrous. As the town’s most outspoken skeptic, Erin Green (Kate Siegel) seems like the person with the least to say on the subject of belief. But when she’s asked by her guilt-ridden friend Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) about what happens after death, Erin gives a monologue that includes, yes, scientific fact, but also a moving bit of wonder.

“Myself. My. Self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing, that word, ‘self,'” Erin begins. In place of selfhood, Erin focuses on the material, describing her body as “mostly just empty space … and solid matter,” just “energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was.”

Erin gives this speech in the final episode, part of a flashback she experiences as she lays dying outside her home, while the rest of the town reels in anguish. They now realize that they’ve been mislead by the charismatic priest Father Hill (Hamish Linklater), who himself mistook a vampire for an angel, and infected his whole town. Erin’s doubt protected her from the fervor that overtook so many, but that doubt made her a pariah.

Yet, instead of smugly thinking, “I told you so,” Erin’s materialistic rationalism has space for transcendence. “That’s what we’re talking about when we say ‘God.’ The one,” she explains. The cosmos and its infinite dreams.”

Lemons (The Fall of the House of Usher, 2023)

For The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan synthesizes several Edgar Allan Poe stories, as well as some aspects of the author’s biography, into an overarching tale about a curse on the family of the powerful businessman Roderick Usher (Greenwood). Each individual episode focuses on another member of the Usher family, with a frame narrative in which Roderick makes his final confession to detective C. Auguste Dupin (Lumbly).

In episode three, “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” Usher gives a speech about his business philosophy, riffing on the proverb, “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Usher rejects the maxim’s simple logic. Instead he tells Dupin that you should respond to life’s lemons with a giant mass media blitz: “Lemon is the only way to say ‘I love you,’ the must-have accessory for engagements or anniversaries…. you charge 40 percent more for organic lemons, 50 percent more for conflict-free lemons,” he raves.

He builds to increasingly absurd heights before reaching his conclusion. “Sit back, rake in the millions, and then, when you’re done, and you’ve sold your lempire for a few billion dollars, then, and only then, you make some fucking lemonade.”

Usher means the speech as evidence of his triumph, proof that he’s a captain of industry. Instead it only shows what a broken man he is, a man who thinks that he has some sort of power, even as his family collapses and dies around him.

The Cosmic Calendar (The Life of Chuck, 2025)

On one hand, The Life of Chuck is about a nobody named Chuck Krantz. Broken into three acts—first about people in an apocalypse who have no idea why Charles Krantz matters, then about a single day in the life of the adult Chuck (Hiddleston), and then about Chuck’s (Jacob Tremblay) adolescence—The Life of Chuck turns out to be a treat for anyone who loves Flanagan’s monologues.

The Life of Chuck gives some choice lines to some great character actors, but the best may be the one that comes relatively early in the movie when schoolteacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) uses Carl Sagan’s metaphor of a cosmic calendar to explain the end of the world to his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan). Like the speech in Midnight Mass, Marty’s monologue is inherently scientific. He’s talking about the relatively infinitesimal existence of humanity, relating it to a phenomenon that has only existed for about an hour in relation to the birth of the cosmos. But again, Flanagan and Ejiofor infuse the speech with emotion, using what could be a nihilistic concept to in fact insist that each and every life matters.

The Life of Chuck opens in limited release on June 6 and in wide release on June 13.