From
2022 • Mystery, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy • Amazon Prime Video
Director: John Griffin
Cast: Harold Perrineau, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ricky He, David Alpay, Chloe Van Landschoot
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Seasons 1–4 · 40 Episodes · Rating 3.5/5 — Gripping mystical horror whose labyrinth is more exciting than its centre.
What M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t achieve with the much anticipated now cancelled adaptation of the popular science fiction series Pines authored by Blake Crouch, From maintains the concept and expands the whole thing into a fractal structure of tree branches and twigs and a network of roots, only not in the sci-fi rather in the mystical horror genre. And that structure itself has gradually become the issue here, not discounting the fact that how the show keeps the intrigue and mystery in its principal focus. That issue could have been resolved if instead of a branched out structure had it followed the path of a winding river with tributaries and distributaries connecting to it.
As usual, like with any series of this nature (referring to the later seasons of Stranger Things here), the first season gets you hooked with its premise very early on and slowly unravels the rules of the game and characters who have to play by those rules. The performances were a little rough on the edges but gradually with each season it has gotten polished. The weirdos did a far better job than the stable ones which is not very left field when it comes to horror shows but what bothered me a tad bit was how it keeps on adding new rules and new players even in the latest one, the fourth season which I am assuming given the feeling of getting near the end, this one might be the penultimate season of what started as a journey with a fascinating world building back in 2023. Within these four seasons, From has its ups and downs. The mechanics of the show are quite mysterious and binge-worthy, the horror elements are also spot on whereas it lacks in a steady gradual flow of screenwriting and exposition reveal. Season one was great, season two was meh, season 3 was again better than its previous installment and the latest one felt like an unfinished bridge that might lead to the end. With such a mesh of network style storytelling, the crux or the foundation seemed to be very derivative of the 2000s-2010s horror formula. It’s one of those cases, where the periphery of the design, the labyrinth where the characters have been navigating all this time for four years has been more exciting than the lynchpin, the centre of the labyrinth.
It’s endless. It’s meandering at places. It has too many pieces moving without a cohesive structure sticking to a solid form with too many rules and new characters and purposeless props (sure, as of yet, who knows they might have meanings and means to an end in the next season) being added here and there to create a sense as though they have always been the integral parts of the design narrative, even though the story has reached its final chapter, I’m presuming, of course. But, it would also be unfair to overlook the praiseworthy materials From adds to an already clunky genre where concepts might be derivative but the executions can always be reinvented with atmospheric secluded setting, juggling of the mind and matter, relationships as well as pitfalls and hierarchical community-based order and camaraderie, sacrifice, anguish, hope and other human values and the lack of it. Moreover, From excels at defining and underlining the randomness of the universe where just when it feels like we have figured out the meaning, the purpose, the schematics, the rules and the patterns, we get thrown a monkey wrench as pure chaos because with a lesson that if we figure it out or we think we have figured it out what’s even the point of a randomness in a chaotic setting.