Locke & Key | Netflix series review

I don't know about you, but I've always found a certain charm in a closed door. Think about it for a moment: doors are everywhere, they are practically fast moving devices capable of teleporting a body from one part of space to another. Yet we don't pay attention to it. There are thousands of doors around us, but in the end we always open the same ones. But what if we decide to open a door that we have never opened? How many mysteries can we find behind those inlaid iron and wood panels?

The story of Locke & Key it is made up of just that. Of ancient keys with an irresistible call like a siren's song. And doors that shouldn't be open but impossible not to cross.

Before opening the door

Locke & Key is the big surprise of this new year television. There is little or almost no talk of it, but it will be talked about a lot, trust me. She seems to have come out of nowhere and yet, before Netflix opened the doors of television series to her, Locke and Key were already famous, but in print.

The series was born in fact from graphic novel of the same name from 2008 designed by Gabriel Rodriguez and written by Joe hill, an author you may not know, but who grew up in the Overlook Hotel, playing with Pennywise while Annie Wilkes was his nurse and dad Stephen King introduced him to the profession.

Handle jammed

Even before the comic series came to its conclusion - in 2013 with 6 total numbers + 3 one-shots - Dimension Film bought the film and television rights with the intention of making a film. Since Locke & Key got sucked into one of those interdimensional black holes (also called the crazy world of television production) which involved Steven Spielberg, 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks TV and even Jesse McCartney (Because You Liveeeeeeee, remember? what happened to it?)

Arriving in 2014 it was the turn of Universal Pictures, who wanted to launch a series of films and in 2018 Hulu he had also produced a pilot which, however, did not convince the investors and nothing more was done with it until the interest on the part of Netflix.

I hope that now that you know the troubled background of the production you will be able to better understand how much time and effort it took to see an adaptation of Locke & Key. An almost infinite wait, especially for those who had read the comic at the time, but thanks to this TV series the long wait will be rewarded.

Turn the key

The horror version of the Goonies. For me this sentence would be enough to stop reading and run to wait, like a child at Christmas, for the release of the series on the Netflix catalog. But in the Goonies you knew that nothing bad could ever happen to those children, not to criminals, not to Slots.

Locke & Key instead begins with a very strange death caused by an explosive key. After some pleasantries from a teen drama, lhe series shows its true face: that of a fantasy-mystery with so many bloodstains that are difficult to wash off.

Bode, Tyler and Kinsey are three boys who, together with their mother Nina, escape from a past that has marked them and took their father away. They go to live in the old family home without knowing anything about the magic keys that it hides, nor of a distant echo that wants to take possession of it.

The narrative structure of Locke & Key puts the viewer on the same level as its characters and, for a good part of the series, one almost has the impression of following different narrative lines:

Bode, the youngest of the family (played by Jackson Robert Scott who horror fans will have already seen die torn apart in IT Chapter 1) is the first to set out to explore the old house, visit its rooms and get in touch with the magic keys. He also makes friends with a woman (Laysla De Oliveira) who lives in the well and says he is the echo of her.

Being in the company of little Locke is a real panacea for the spirit and the soul because brings to mind the discoveries made as children, when even finding an old forgotten object in a drawer was an incredible adventure.

Tyler (Connore Jessup) e Kinsey (Emilia Jones) instead they are two teenagers, they go to school, they know people, they have obligations, commitments and all those things we don't want to hear about when there is a huge house to explore full of magical keys. Their path, however, is equally interesting and functional to insert, slowly, all the secondary characters in the adventure: how Scott (Petrice Jones) and Gabe (Griffin Gluck), friends from Kinsey's “Savini” film club, or the guys on the hockey team who won't fail to take Tyler to a high-alcohol party.

Finally there is Nina (Darby Stanchfield), the new head of the Locke family, a widow who must put her family back in order and fix the large house inherited from her husband. Helped by Duncan (Aaron Ashmore), uncle of the young Locke and brother of the deceased Rendel.

The characters are very well written and interpreted. Little Bode is so natural that it makes you want to be a kid again and despite some narrative flaws (especially on love relationships) the series works fully and the very young cast is capable of transmitting a varied emotional sector to the viewer.

The first 30 minutes are enough to fully immerse yourself in the atmosphere created by Locke & Key. And even if the story described so far may not seem exceptional or even childish, I assure you that fYou will struggle to recover from the final cliffhangers of each episode.

A key to everything

Locke & Key works well because even before being a TV series and bending to the times and the logic of television, it's a story, pure, of those that suck you in with a naturalness that leaves you spellbound. A story full of mysteries that never provides answers, but only other questions. And in which research is a central theme and fascinating.

The viewer in fact remains completely involved in the discovery of the keys, in their powers and in the effects they have on reality. There is a key that is used to enter people's heads and opens a door to our way of thinking, of being or of cataloging memories, almost in the style of Inside out by Pixar. There is a key that allows you to open a door on any place and another that turns ghosts. There is a hidden door somewhere that shouldn't be opened yet its call is irresistible.

And these are just a few of the many keys and quirks you will see appearing. At the end of the 10 episodes, the series seems to have only scratched the surface of what could become an immense franchise, set in several eras (also seen the announcement of a new chapter of the graphic novel set during the Second World War).

What's on the other side?

Jumanji, Gravity Falls, The Thing, Casper, The Goonies, Ghostbusters and The Lost Room if you could tear these productions into many small pieces and glue them together you will have a perfect portrait of what it is Locke & Key, a magical and adult series at the same time without ever being childish.

The serial productions of the last few years have raised the bar, churning out quality products one after the other without giving any respite to us poor spectators. It would be nice to have time to see everything. Many times it would be nice to have time just to have time. Unfortunately, there are no magic keys that can give us something like this, but Locke & Key arrives on February 7, a series capable of not making you feel the passing of time. And perhaps this is the most magical thing there can be.