His name is pronounced “Bodie”, and with his predilection for wandering off, it is shouted aloud so often you begin to wonder if the late Rendell’s many secrets included a deep love for 1970s Brit-cop classic The Professionals.Īfter experiencing such seismic trauma, the bickering young Lockes are in bad shape, and when they pull up in front of their new digs, the mansion looms over them hungrily.

Seemingly less affected is their much younger brother Bode (Jackson Robert Scott, who played poor doomed Georgie in the recent It films). If Nina has uprooted their lives in search of a fresh start, the locals are already aware of – and acutely intrigued by – the Locke family’s tragic circumstances.Īdolescents Tyler (Connor Jessup) and Kinsey (Emilia Jones) are wrestling with heightened feelings of anger and anguish over their father’s death. This is the site of Rendell’s long-abandoned family seat, Keyhouse, a gothic pile on the outskirts of the small town of Matheson. It is, at heart, a horror-tinged fantasy epic, but before all the spooky stuff really kicks in, it begins as a textured and wrenching story of loss.Īfter the abrupt murder of teacher Rendell Locke, harrowingly relived in flashback, his widow Nina (Darby Stanchfield) is in the process of relocating their young family from rainy Washington to chilly Massachusetts. The source material – a long-established comic series created by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez – predates the rise of Netflix but it is remarkable how it dovetails with the streaming service’s thematic obsessions and commercial priorities (all the more remarkable when you learn of its chequered history, with three different pilots filmed at various studios in the past decade and ambitious plans for a movie trilogy shelved).

At first glance, their latest global launch, Locke and Key, seems like some sort of optimised Netflix megamix: set in a creepy mansion full of arcane mysteries (like The Haunting of Hill House), it centres on young kids shellshocked by the death of a parent (as in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) and features supernatural forces elbowing their way into the real world (a la Stranger Things). M uch is made of Netflix being a slave to the algorithm, cancelling beloved shows judged to have underperformed by the streaming behemoth’s mysterious metrics and rushing to commission new content that echoes proven hits.

Locke & key comics