Locke & Key Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. The Sanitised & Inconsistent Tone

Though the Locke & Key comic was often incredibly disturbing and brutally violent, much of the "mature" content has been scaled back significantly in this TV adaptation, opting instead for a more easily digestible dark fantasy series.

As a result, the tone feels like a jumbled mish-mash of The Haunting of Hill House, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Stranger Things, and most frustratingly of all, Riverdale.

There is a total disconnect between the show's aspirations to be both a frothy high school melodrama and something more tantalisingly macabre.

On one hand, the show features the bloodless-yet-savage murder of children and a poor soul being strangled to death during sex, and on the other, it's full of all the typical high school drama tropes, like awkward parties, love triangles and, yes, the excessive overuse of pop music.

Clearly, Netflix should've just committed to one tone and stuck with it, and given that the source material clings firmly to grim horror, that's obviously what the show needed.

Instead, Locke & Key is a frustrating, often jarring combination of two styles and moods that just don't fit together.