Netflix’s latest horror drama, Locke & Key , sizzles with promise and fun in the first few episodes and then dies down as the makers run out of tropes to rehash. The young-adult vibe it gives off is similar to the one you find in Stranger Things , an actual blockbuster offering from the friendly streaming giant.
This series, even with more or less the same amount of intriguing ingredients as Stranger Things , appears as a juvenile attempt at building a world that’s full of magical keys and demons. The ten-episode season centers on the Lockes who’re dealing with the loss of the patriarch, Rendell Locke (Bill Heck). His wife, Nina (Darby Stanchfield), isn’t the one to just accept her fate and move on. She wants to find out why a school student wanted to learn about Rendell’s ancestral home “Key House” – the answer to which Rendell didn’t want to readily hand out and ended up getting murdered. It’s indeed a cunning setup that allows the crumbs of sinister to grow in volume as each of the tree children, Tyler Locke (Connor Jessup), Kinsey Locke (Emilia Jones), and Bode Locke (Jackson Robert Scott), figures out different ways to understand and piece together the puzzle that left their home broken.
As in The Haunting of Hill House , there’s a mansion in Locke & Key (Key House) where the youngest kid, Bode, runs around and explores all the rooms and picks up noises that seem to whisper to him. While the exterior shots that capture the length and breadth of the property are eye-candy-ish, the insides look like they’ve been accommodating secrets from the seventeenth century. Well, at the end of the day, it’s a horror series, so the mysteries must keep tapping on the viewers’ screens!
Now, this is also the place that Rendell hesitated to visit when he was alive. His brother, Duncan (Aaron Ashmore), too, doesn’t wish to live there and his memories about the house are hazy. And he has somehow forgotten the details related to Rendell’s friends and the mischievous activities he was engaged in as a teenager. In the first episode, there’s a scene where Nina enters a mirror and gets lost. As her screams start to grow louder, Tyler walks through the same mirror with a rope tied around his waist (to get back to the real world without bothering about the labyrinths) and follows her voice to reach her. It’s a fantastically written television moment that uses mirrors as a trap, and it relies on the strength of art direction and visual effects. But, since such scenes are few and far between, I couldn’t sit through the entire run of the show without looking miffed.
The various keys that Bode and his siblings find, like the “Head Key” that permits them to step into their own minds, or those of the others’, are mind-boggling. Kinsey’s mind, which is designed as a shopping mall, holds thousands of memories and a demon that attacks people she’s afraid of. Similarly, other keys possess great powers, too. The “Ghost Key” allows the holder to observe the goings-on from above like a ghost. And the “Anywhere Key” lets a person go to any part of the world by simply inserting the key into the lock and pushing the door open. All these might sound as crazy and bombastic ideas and Bode even revels in tomfoolery for a while, however, everything isn’t hunky-dory always.
Locke & Key is based on the comic book series of the same name by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez; hence the detailing appears rich. But what gained Stranger Things and The Haunting of Hill House online and offline fans is their ability to make the relationships between their characters grow gradually. The rare bond that the teenagers shared in the sci-fi horror series and the thorns around which the siblings trundled in the latter aren’t impossible to replicate. Nevertheless, when there are better and well-established versions of such kinds of horror shows, why would the home audiences line up for Locke & Key in the new decade?
