Ordinary children with extraordinary gifts are challenged and encouraged in this eight-part drama from writer Benjamin Cavell and director Jack Bender.
Stephen King's 2019 novel, The Institute, is nearly 600 pages long, but it's a short book: a return to the Ordinary Children with Extraordinary Abilities subgenre that dominated the King of Horror's early works. It's thoroughly readable and ultimately forgettable, bringing a modern perspective to the familiar plot, but never emerging as anything distinctive or specific enough to rank anywhere near the author's peak.
Stars: Dylan Bailey, Ben Barnes, Mary-Louise Parker
In that sense, MGM+'s eight-part TV adaptation—which addresses the basics of the book's plot but leaves unresolved issues for a hypothetical second season—delivers roughly what the source material deserves. It's simple, polished, and occasionally gripping, but, like the book itself, it comes across more as a mashup of King clichés and archetypes than a fully developed or evolved version of the formula.
The series comes from writer Benjamin Cavell, whose recent version of The Stand was so inaccurate that the pandemic thriller is reportedly already getting a remake, and director Jack Bender, who worked on the underrated Mr. Mercedes. So it's no surprise that The Institute is, at the very least, in tune with King. From the New England settings (masterfully rendered by Nova Scotians) to King's fondness for repetitive slang—prepare to roll your eyes at the repetitions of "night call," "fatty," and "point shooting"—the series feels, on the whole, "correct," if disappointingly vague.
Despite its faithfulness to King's voice, this is the second consecutive adaptation in which Cavell begins by discarding—and not necessarily for the better—King's chosen narrative structure. Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) is a former Boston cop relieved of his duties under circumstances that haven't made the headlines. He finds himself in Dennison River Bend, Maine, working as a "night watchman": a glorified patrolman, a remnant of a quieter era of friendly community policing.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, 14-year-old genius Luke (Joe Freeman) is preparing to drop out of high school and start classes at MIT when he is kidnapped and ends up at the Institute, a concrete-clad facility just outside Dennison River Bend. Under the iron eye of Mrs. Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) and the scathing gaze of Security Chief Stackhouse (Julian Richings) and Chief of Science Hendricks (Robert Joy), the Institute is a testing ground for young people with specific gifts.
In addition to being an intellectual prodigy, Luke possesses very low telekinesis and joins a special squad that includes the friendly Kalisha (Simone Miller), the rebellious Nick (Fionn Laird), and the unusually powerful Avery (Viggo Hanvelt). Sigsby oversees a program of invasive medical testing, torture, and interventions designed to enhance these kids' latent powers, all with a nefarious purpose that, honestly, makes very little sense either on paper or on screen.
Despite the implication that the fate of the world depends on the recruits and their combined influence, it all builds to... well, honestly, it doesn't build to much.
In the book, King introduces Tim and his shallow backstory in the opening chapters; then the character disappears entirely for a long stretch that focuses on the Institute's inhabitants as they are poked, prodded, and abused, planning an escape that will allow the stories to intersect. For the series, Cavell intercuts Tim and Luke's stories from the outset. It's a logical choice, since, aside from Parker, Barnes is the show's most recognizable star, but illogical, since Tim is a truly boring character. Barnes has obvious charisma, but he's not an intrinsically interesting actor; there are three or four episodes where the goings-on at the Institute are tense and intriguing, while Tim runs a 3.7-kilometer circuit, losing momentum every time he appears.
It's not a lack of momentum that the series can sustain, since The Institute is designed to be somewhat anticlimactic. King's typical approach to the genre—talented protagonists facing off against cold, governmental entities or hypocritical spiritual forces against a horror backdrop—has fallen out of favor in favor of comparable superhero origin stories with high-stakes skills and stakes. But The Institute is a low-key standalone film compared to various incarnations of X-Men, The Umbrella Academy, Gen V, or Supercell.
When I mentioned MGM+'s The Institute to a colleague, after a pause, he responded, "I think I've already read that?" Expect a similarly unconvincing response to a series that never works well enough to generate excitement, but at least never generates enough anticipation to disappoint.
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