Roush Review: Don’t Get Lost Seeking All of the Influences in ‘From’

From

Matt's Rating:

Imitation in its sincerest form gives a comfort level of spooky familiarity to the mysterious horrors of From, the new creepshow on Epix.

Borrowing from (get it?) sources including Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Hitchcock, The Twilight Zone, and even Lost—including featuring one of the latter hit’s stars, Harold Perrineau — this derivative yet eerie existential thriller is set in an unnamed town with no exit where ravenous bogeymen lurk at night. Where the hell are they? (I’ll start worrying if they find a hatch at the end of the first season.)

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The residents have come from all over, and somehow they all end up in this same neck of the woods, driving in circles before they give up to stay in a place that time somehow forgot. “If you climb high enough, even a nightmare can look like a dream,” says one of the more optimistic townspeople. Because looking down, you’re likely to see ghouls if you stay out past sundown. “These things out there, they like to hunt,” warns the bossy proprietor of Colony House, a boarding house for the local separatist movement that otherwise isn’t into following the town’s adapt-or-die protocols.

Perrineau is the standout among a diverse but mostly indifferent cast as Boyd, the tormented sheriff of this trapped community. Doubling as town crier as he rings a bell nightly to remind the folks to stay inside with windows and doors locked, Boyd lays out the rules of survival to a young family that has unfortunately crashed their RV in the nearby woods. (They’re soon joined by an annoying jerk from the tech world who thinks it’s all an elaborate joke. Until he doesn’t.)

“Do you believe in monsters?” a resident asks the family’s initially skeptical mom. If you don’t, then steer far away from From.

From, Series Premiere, Sunday, February 20, 9/8c, Epix