Too edgy and clever to be wasted on kids: Netflix’s Locke & Key reviewed

One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which subsequently reveals itself to be a near-masterpiece.

This almost happened with Locke & Key (Netflix). ‘You realise I’m watching this on sufferance. The second you’ve seen enough to review, we’re moving on to something else,’ declared the Fawn. And I could sort of see her point. Not only does it take a while to get going but it feels like a mash-up of every supernatural-for-teens drama you’ve ever seen, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Harry Potter. The scenarios too are overfamiliar to the point of cliché: big, spooky mansion with creaky iron gates and a mysterious past; awkward teenagers trying to settle in to a new high school where they are mocked for their weirdness by the cool kids; remote, distrait parents who are totally ill equipped to understand all this eerie, dark magical stuff intruding into their lives.

Stick with it, though. It just gets better and better. Darker and darker too, which I think is a function of the fact that it began life as a comic series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Comic writers are different from normal writers: they’re often weirder, definitely less bound by convention and have to think much more visually. Also, as my friend Mark Millar says, ‘Two interesting things have to happen in each chapter. So you get a movie with at least 12 interesting things on average, which is 11 more than most movies.’

This relentless inventiveness is why I think I prefer Locke & Key to Stranger Things, a franchise that went an awfully long way on its charm, its delightful cast of characters, and its retro nostalgia, but which never quite delivered on plot coherence.