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The Guardian
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Institute review – this is how you butcher a Stephen King novel
Me, I'm always in the mood for hokum. You can serve it to me at any point on the largest platter you have and I will grab my hooey knife and absurdity fork and start shovelling. But, like any chef, you have to know what you're doing. You have to make some effort, have the basic ingredients assembled in the right proportions and send it out from the kitchen hot, steaming and looking delicious. Tepid hokum, bland hokum – well, that ain't no hokum at all. And so to the latest Stephen King adaptation, this time by Benjamin Cavell and directed by Jack Bender (Lost, From, Under the Dome – the latter another King tale) of the horror master's 2019 novel The Institute, travelling to our screens under the same name. Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman, the son of Martin Freeman and Amanda Abbington, in his first major role and bringing much to a part that barely wants to allow anything) is a super smart 14-year-old, planning a move to MIT when he is snatched from his home one night and relocated to a shadowy government facility (the institute) deep in the forests of Maine to assist with unspecified but – he is assured – world-saving work. Not just because of his IQ but because of the nascent telekinetic powers he also possesses. What were the odds! You can probably take it from here, but let me do my professional duty. The institute houses an array of youngsters who have demonstrated either telekinetic (TK) or telepathic (TP) abilities in their ordinary lives. No one, as yet, has demonstrated both, and none has our spiky hero's gift for analysing everything around him and showing the grownups how incredible kids can be, yeah? Kalisha (Simone Miller) is a TP and keeps kissing Luke – I am not too clear why, but it has something to do with her having had chickenpox, maybe, and wanting to pass it on? God knows. George (Arlen So) is a TK and gets to use up the first episode's nugatory SFX budget by raising a pool of spilt water into the air as a glistening vertical stream. Nicky (Fionn Laird) is a slightly older inmate who grew up in foster care and is – quite loudly, for such a heavily surveilled facility – sceptical of the authorities' insistence that the children will have their memories wiped at the end of all this and be returned safely to their unquestioning parents. This is probably wise. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Said authorities comprise Ms Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker, playing icily against type) who cares not a jot for her young charges beyond what they can do to further the mysterious project. Behind the professional facade, she has a self-harm habit and a father with dementia – but, if this is meant to make her less of a cipher than any of the other characters being moved around the cheap, uninspiring sets, it does not work. Ditto the bleak affair she is having with Dr Hendricks (Robert Joy), who is in charge of the research and experimentation programme. Rounding out the staff are Stackhouse (Julian Richings, who is British and bony-faced, so you know he is the real villain of the piece) and the sadistic Tony (Jason Diaz), who actually carries out the tagging, drugging and restraining of the institute's young captives/lab rats that Hendricks' programme requires. Outside the facility is the B plot. Good cop and even better guy Tim (Ben Barnes, bringing, like Freeman, the most he can to an unrewarding part) has taken a job with local police as a night knocker (a patrolman who makes sure everything's locked up and calm) to recover from the trauma of being forced to shoot an armed 16-year-old back in the city. A strange lady keeps warning him about mysteries and untrustworthy townsfolk, but I wonder if anyone will ever take heed and start to wonder what goes on in the heavily fortified concrete building buried in the woods on the outskirts of town? And with that, and the promise that Tim will (eventually – it takes far too long) intersect with the main narrative, the last basic King box is ticked and we can see exactly what happens when you keep the plot but strip out the man's genius for bringing his characters to life, while building dread at a cellular level. Instead, we get what looks like the torture of children to shock and upset, with some gratuitous references to the Holocaust to make things worse. If you stripped those out and upped the pace, The Institute might have made for some perfectly serviceable fun for the early-adolescent demographic. As things stand, it's hardly fun at all. The Institute is on MGM+ on Prime Video in the UK and US, and on Stan in Australia.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Stephen King's 'The Institute' sets gifted children against nefarious adults
"The Institute," a 2019 novel by Stephen King, Maine's Master of the Macabre — or horror, I just said macabre for the alliteration — has become a miniseries with some major additions and minor emendations. Premiering Sunday on MGM+, it belongs to a popular genre in which superpowerful young'uns are gathered in some sort of academy, and more specifically to one in which children with extraordinary powers are weaponized by adults for … reasons. They always have reasons, those cruel adults. The child at the center of the story is 14-year-old Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman, who shoulders a lot of dramatic weight), a genius with a mostly untapped ability to move things with his mind. (Classic power!) One night while Luke is asleep, people break into his house, and when he wakes in the morning in his bed, you know as well as I that what he'll find outside his bedroom door is not the rest of his house — just like Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner," one of several other works for the screen that may cross your mind as the show goes on. "Stranger Things," "The Matrix," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Breakfast Club" and "Severance" are some others that came to my mind. Luke is in the Institute, a drab complex, whose young inmates are identified either as "TK" (telekinetic) or "TP" (telepathic), or once in a blue moon, "PC" (precognitive). Just how Luke's kidnappers fixed on him in the first place is something for you not to think about. But there he is, and because he is also a genius, his warders think he might be more than usually useful to them. Ms. Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) runs the place; her cheery tone and promises of fun food and no bedtime does not hide from you, or from Luke, the fact that she is a liar. That she tells Luke he's there as part of a project to "serve not just your country but the whole world" is not something to impress any kidnapped teenager. Aiding and abetting Sigsby are sepulchral security head Stackhouse (Julian Richings), who at one point will speak the words "unjustly vilified term final solution"; Tony (Jason Diaz), an almost comically sadistic orderly; and Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy), who has cooked up the pseudoscientific nonsense at the heart of the plan and puts Luke through a variety of upsetting "tests." Housekeeper Maureen (Jane Luk) is nice, though — not to be completely trusted, necessarily, but nice. Meanwhile, handsome Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes), a former policeman, decorated for an incident that left him bad about feeling decorated, hitchhikes into town — the town near the Institute, whatever it's called — and gets himself a job with the local constabulary as its "nightknocker," checking that businesses have locked their doors and the streets are trouble free. At the police station, he meets Officer Wendy Gullickson (Hannah Galway), which makes space for some light guy-gal vibing, while his nocturnal peregrinations will bring him into contact with Annie (Mary Walsh), a street person and conspiracy theorist, who does know an actual thing or two, and who will inspire Tim to poke around that place up on the hill with the guards and the barbed-wire fence. He may not be a cop anymore, but he is not, he says, "the kind of guy who can look the other way." At the mostly empty, sort of shabby Institute — like a student center that hasn't been updated in 30 years, because what's the point — Luke meets fellow inmates Kalisha (Simone Miller), who inexplicably kisses him upon first meeting, Iris (Birva Pandya), cool kid Nick (Fionn Laird), and later little Avery (Viggo Hanvelt), who may prove the most powerful of all. The institute has a Front Hall and a Back Hall; at some point, kids from the former are transferred to the latter, which completes a "graduation" the staff mark with a cake and candles. (They're told that after doing time in the Back Hall, they'll be going home, which could not possibly be part of the plan.) The meaning of the column of smoke rising from one of the compound's buildings should be immediately obvious. Written by Benjamin Cavell (who co-wrote the 2020 adaptation of King's "The Stand") and directed by Jack Bender (King's "Mr. Mercedes"), it drags at times and isn't particularly interesting to look at, though there's action and a few special effects toward the end, which, King being King, isn't over until it's over — and it never is. Parker is always good to watch, and her Mrs. Sigsby is given some material to make her seem human — if not quite to humanize her — but nothing regarding the Institute and its complicated plans and methods really makes any sense, even in King's made-world. Still, if you regard "The Institute" as a kind of YA novel about resistance and revolt, and a metaphor for the way young people have been sacrificed by the old to feed their agendas and wars, it has some legs. Sign up for Screen Gab, a free newsletter about the TV and movies everyone's talking about from the L.A. Times. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Geek Girl Authority
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
Ben Barnes and Joe Freeman on Starring in THE INSTITUTE
Stephen King fans, there's a new adaptation in town. The Institute is about a young teenager, Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman), who finds himself trapped in the mysterious institute of the title. While he and his newfound group of young friends attempt to survive a number of experiments and tests, in a town nearby, former police officer Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) tries to make a new life for himself. But it's not long before the mysteries of the institute come knocking on Tim's door. I had the opportunity to have a quick chat with Ben Barnes and Joe Freeman over Zoom about the show and how they approached their roles in this MGM+ adaptation. RELATED: Revival : Co-Creators Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce on Crafting 'Weird' New Series This interview has been edited for clarity. The Stephen King World Monita Roy Mohan: So, for both of you, what attracted you to the show? Ben Barnes: I think, for me, the idea of being part of a Stephen King adaptation. I was such a huge fan of so many of his films, from Shawshank [Redemption] to Stand by Me to The Running Man . He's just a master of tension, and he has such thoughtful characters. And then when I started to read this book and seeing this kind of interesting, stoic, complicated, quiet man who cares about the world and has a real moral compass—having played bad guys for a few years in a row—the idea of playing a good guy in the Stephen King world was a real lure for me. Joe Freeman: I just auditioned. BB: You got it, though, didn't you? JF: Yeah, it was just another tape. Send it off, we'll see, you know? But I love the show. It's great. RELATED: Agape Mngomezulu Talks Bryon and Bracia's Relationship in Ginny & Georgia Season 3 Joe Freeman on Being on Point Joe Freeman as Luke Ellis in Amazon MGM Studios' The Institute. Image courtesy Amazon MGM Studios MRM: Joe, Luke goes through so much in this show. Can you share what you found most challenging about this role? But also, on the flip side, what was most rewarding about this role? JF: Yeah, I think challenging… Because I'm very new to all of this, it was keeping 100 percent focused at all times on set. You realize very quickly that you cannot drop the ball at all, at any point. There were just some things I had to endure, like the water, the swimming, in the very cold, Canadian, 1 a.m. November river—which I was not anticipating was going to happen. But I'm glad I did it. BB: Builds character, mate. JF [joking]: Yeah, that was probably one of the most rewarding parts. BB [laughing]: You're a man now. JF: Yeah, yeah. Everyone needs to do it. But I would say the rewarding part was seeing the show. Just seeing what we'd created. BB: What we'd made, yeah. RELATED: Revival 's Romy Weltman on Becoming Em and Working With Melanie Scrofano JF: Because we're all there to do the same exact job and it was just amazing to get to know all of these people and then to see all of their work, no matter what it was, if it was makeup or hair or the photography, it was just all there on the screen and that was very special to watch it back. BB: I remember seeing the first film I ever was in properly and thinking, 'This isn't real. This is magical.' Ben Barnes on Playing a Good Guy in The Institute Ben Barnes as Tim Jamieson in Amazon MGM Studios' The Institute. Image courtesy Amazon MGM Studios MRM: Ben, from your side, you've already mentioned it. Tim is so complicated and mysterious, but so kind. How did you bring all these layers of him to life? BB: I think I started my career playing these sort of young hero types. And then I sidetracked into more, sort of, thoughtful, philosophical characters; and then I had a few years of playing bad guys, psychopaths, untrustworthy guys, douchebags, all of it. It was so brilliant to be able to kind of spread my wings in that way and be offered different kinds of roles, to play different kinds of men. But I was really feeling that pull—I think, particularly after the pandemic—that pull to play a good man and someone who cares about being a good man in the world. Like, you know, which is something he has in common with me, and that felt important. So, when I read this, I felt connective tissue with that character. RELATED: Cecilia Lee on the Wild Ride That Is Fear Street: Prom Queen But being a good man doesn't mean you have to be a boring man. And I think that we, all of us, have duplicity in us. All of us have so many different sides. That self-awareness in the character, that he actually sometimes gets involved in things when he knows it might not be the best thing for him. He knows he shouldn't. Having that awareness about himself is something I found curious and interesting about him as a character. But someone who wants to be on the right side of history and fight for what's right was kind of the driving force. MRM: Thank you so much. The Institute premieres with two episodes on MGM+ starting Sunday, July 13. THE BONDSMAN's Kathrine Barnes on Death, Demons and Dual Roles Monita has been championing diversity, inclusivity, and representation in entertainment media through her work for over a decade. She is a contributor at Bam Smack Pow, and her bylines have appeared on 3-time Eisner Award-winning publication Women Write About Comics, Geek Girl Authority, HuffPost, (formerly Soundsphere/Screensphere, FanSided's Show Snob, and Vocal. She was also a TV/Movies features writer at Alongside her twin, Monita co-hosts the pop culture podcast Stereo Geeks.
UPI
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
Stephen King-produced 'Institute' to premiere on MGM+ July 13
1 of 4 | Luke Ellis stars in "The Institute," premiering July 13. Photo courtesy of MGM+ June 6 (UPI) -- The Stephen King-produced series The Institute is slated to premiere on MGM+ July 13. Directed and produced by Jack Bender, the adaptation of King's 2019 novel of the same name will star Mary-Louise Parker, Ben Barnes, Joe Freeman and Simone Miller. The story follows "teen genius Luke Ellis (Freeman), who is kidnapped and awakens at The Institute, a facility full of children who all got there the same way he did and who are all possessed of unusual abilities," a synopsis said. "In a nearby town, haunted former police officer Tim Jamieson (Barnes) has come looking to start a new life, but the peace and quiet won't last, as his story and Luke's are destined to collide." The Life of Chuck, based on a novella by King, is now in theaters and a series based on King's best-selling book, Carrie, is in the works at Prime Video.
