TV Show Review: The Institute. This series follows Elvis, a genius…

I finally got around to watching The Institute after sitting on it for months. To be honest, I wanted a reason to see Ben Barnes on the screen again. He’s been out of it since Shadow and Bone season 2, and it felt like it would be different.

Light Spoilers ahead!

Quick Recap

The Institute is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Stephen King. (Already you know it’s going to be weird. And it was.) It follows a shady institute that abducts children with special abilities, heightens those abilities, and then milks them raw of those abilities before getting rid of them for good. It was renewed for a second season in August, and quite frankly, I saw it coming.

The Plot

The movie starts slowly.

You’re taken through the genius mind of Elvis, who is smart, beyond smart, and is in talks to go to MIT. While at dinner with his parents, he moved his pizza tray, to no surprise of his parents, and before the day was over, he was kidnapped.

Elvis wakes in The Institute and is given the 411 on what to expect, what not to hope for, and escape being one of the hope-nots.

At the other end, we get to walk with Tim, a cop who is trying to get out of the fallout of a mistake he made on the job. Tim eventually takes up the position of a night-knocker in the same town as The Institute, and through observation and investigation, he gets tangled up with the affairs of the institute.

I’m doing my best not to spoil this, but I have to tell you, it kept me up, no kidding. I had to just see it through.

Think of The Institute as Stranger Things, where Eleven and her peers were experimented on until they had psychic abilities, but in this case, we have only telekinesis or telepathy at a negative or positive, and sometimes a mixture of both. The insane experiments used to drive toward the results are gruelling. Torture.

The Story

Not gonna lie, it was slow at first. You had to be invested in the first scene because it dragged a bit. It picks up after the kidnapping, and immediately, you know the place is shady, but to what degree are they shady? You don’t know. They don’t show definitive evidence of shadiness till the very end, which leaves you guessing, but almost sure that no child comes out alive. But there are circumstances worse than death, and these children learn so the very hard way

As it approaches the story from Tim and Elvis’s lives, you know it will intertwine, and both will play an integral role, and when it finally happens, everything goes downhill from there. You don’t know who to trust and who not to trust, with trustworthy people being taken down at every point.

It’s not an action series but a slow-burning supernatural story that unfolds piece by piece, letting you in on who’s who. I highly recommend it if you’re a supernatural horror fan, but you must be patient with it.

You’ll find yourself wanting to give up — don’t. The unfolding is in the story and the characters themselves, with their decisions determining where the dominoes fall.

It’s a good watch.