Locke & Key

An entertaining and heartfelt family adventure about growing up, coping with loss, and finding a demon at the bottom of a well on your haunted estate. Imagine Goosebumps for grown-ups, or Stranger Things on antidepressants.

While much of Locke and Key feels superficially familiar, cushioned by the superior production design and a lush score, there are enough deliberately disconcerting or oddball moments to make it a constantly evolving pleasure. And, with multiple volumes of the collected comic series already on bookstore shelves, this reincarnation could just be the start.

With a cast comprised largely of wide-eyed teenagers the tone sometimes verges on The Hunger Games with a sprinkling of Stranger Things. Yet the sheer accumulation of thrills, chills and shocking twists gives the 10-part series irresistible momentum.

As the episodes progress, the writing becomes more confident, and the season ends strongly. "Locke & Key" is the TV-show equivalent of a fixer-upper with good bones. The structure and the foundation are there, but some cosmetic updates might help.

The writing explores recovery in an accessible way, and a diverse cast helps create an inviting new world. This combination of fantasy and horror provides opportunities not just for scares and imagination, but for astute reflections of society: that self-imposed burdens can leave everyone bowed. Locke & Key weaves a silver lining into an otherwise foreboding tapestry.

In the end, Locke & Key is at its best when it stops trying to be cool and edgy and gives into the earnest spectacle of kids getting pieces of their father back through unexplainable forces. That is a hugely engrossing and affecting idea that keeps the show afloat at first and makes it truly sing at last.

Locke & Key isn’t at all shy about revealing Key House’s incredible secrets; it just struggles to then do much with them, instead tending to hit pause on any acquired momentum to dive back into high school dating/movie club drama. As such, things don’t really get crackling until Episode 5 or so.

To say there’s a lot going on is putting it mildly. The writers do an admirable job of blending and connecting those multiple storylines, but not all of the subplots are all that involving or exciting. From time to time, the overall momentum slows to a gloomy crawl. The younger actors all turn in lively, empathetic performance. ... Unfortunately, many of the other adult cast members turn in underwhelming work.

"Locke & Key" is worth it in the end if you can push past the parts that are uneven and a little messy.

Luckily, the solid performances, like the crackerjack conceit, keep things from falling totally flat. Jones and Jessup are particularly excellent, both alone and together. ... Edge is exactly what this series lacks, and not in a scandalous way.

As is, it’s a perfectly fun, flighty dark fantasy that hasn’t quite unlocked its full potential.

It knows it’s walking familiar ground — spooky but never scary, occasionally violent but never gory, magical but hardly wondrous. Watchable but nowhere near fascinating.

Locke & Key may mete out its genre goofiness over the course of a slump-filled first season, but if you want more than morsels to sustain you, there are plenty of similarly-toned shows without the barrier to entry.

Despite Locke & Key’s heavy thematic dimensions, its potential for exploring the interlocking themes of memory and grief is undercut by a host of issues: its pedestrian score, which doesn’t trust the audience one iota to make obvious connections; its light-handed approach to the story’s horror elements; its tone, which renders the show a young-adult-skewed adaptation of the source material; and a lack of imagination in its approach to memory as a plot dynamic.

Simply put, there are too many TV shows about magical/special/mutant teens to get away with something that comes across as being this generic.

Netflix’s “Locke and Key” works, but it also feels like the inevitable product of the streaming network’s own algorithm. It feels so calibrated to what’s already worked for Netflix that it ultimately feels more safe than anything else.

The series is a near-ish approximation of a lot of other things — including several Netflix shows in the middle of long hiatuses — without ever quite seeming inspired or essential in its own right.

Eevery time Locke & Key hits a peak — episodes three and four and seven through nine are the highlights — it's followed by a valley. ... Overall, Locke & Key struggles to establish the stakes for the series — I still can't tell you what would happen if Evil Well Girl (Laysla De Oliveira) achieved her evil goals — and struggles more to decide who it's intended for.

Perhaps the adaptation's troubled development history explains why this incarnation of the series seems determined to play it as safe as possible -- as safe as a show that features multiple scenes of characters using keys to unlock the contents of their heads can be anyway.

Sadly, “Locke & Key” is similar to the creepy old Key House, an old, outdated mansion filled with potentially fun mysteries and intrigue but lacking the strong bones and foundation that can sustain the structure for years to come.