Tom Hiddleston plays mild-mannered Charles “Chuck” Krantz, whose death coincides with the end of the world, in the trailer for Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, which dropped on Thursday.

The teaser early on shows the back of Hiddleston’s head as he plays the titular character of Chuck and walks down a suburban mall promenade. Then, now in a suit and spectacles, we finally see Hiddleston’s face as he nervously stares into the far distance.

“The universe is large, and it contains multitudes, but… it also contains me,” Chuck says in a voice-over to underline the movie’s message about embracing joy in the face of tragedy. The genre-tripping trailer for horror hitmaker Flanagan’s doomsday drama only hints at the end of Chuck’s life with early snippets of an Ecg heart line and a ticking clock.

The movie told in reverse order from the end...