Whoever watched the series knows — a single tree can alter destinies.
In From, one tree decides everything: where people land, how they die, what they remember. The tree isn’t just a symbol of mystery; it’s birth itself, that strange moment when we’re thrust into existence without consent or clarity.
No one chooses the branch they fall from. No one knows how they end up in this strange village surrounded by looping roads.
It’s like life itself, a labyrinth disguised as a world.
Every direction feels like an exit, yet somehow, we always end up back where we started.
The trapped town in From is not fantasy, but it’s a metaphor for existence.
And the monsters that come out at night? They are us, the demons within, wearing the faces of our fears, greed, jealousy, guilt, and unspoken rage.
1. The Tree of Birth and the Loop of Life
When the characters first encounter that impossible tree, the one that seems to open into another world, it feels like destiny, yet it’s also a curse. Just as our birth feels miraculous yet bewildering.
We didn’t ask to arrive here, in this body, in this century. Like the villagers, we opened our eyes one day and found ourselves in motion, mid-story, surrounded by strangers pretending to know the script.
And then we begin our own looping roads: school, job, love, ambition. It’s all leading nowhere but back to the same question: Why am I here?
Kafka would have smiled at that: “a world where the path keeps returning to the same gate, and the gatekeeper never opens it.”
We are the characters of From, wandering the infinite circle, calling it “life.”
2. The Monsters That Walk Like Men
In the show, the monsters are polite. They knock before entering, speak softly, smile, and then slaughter.
That’s how evil really works, not as some external horror, but as our own reflection, civilized and courteous until the moment it devours.
The monsters in From are not supernatural beings. They are metaphors for the hidden instincts we bury under manners, just like envy, lust, cruelty, and despair.
Each night, when the lights go off and the talismans tremble, what we really fear is ourselves.
Dostoevsky once wrote, “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.”
That’s what the show reveals that the darkness doesn’t come from outside; it’s born within, nurtured by our desire to escape it.
3. The Illusion of Escape
The people in From spend their days trying to leave the town. They build theories, maps, and radios, just as we develop our religions, governments, and technologies.
But every attempt leads them back to the same point.
That’s the tragedy of the human condition: we destroy the present chasing the mirage of the future.
We call it hope, but it’s often delusion disguised as progress.
Camus would call it absurdity, the eternal tension between our need for meaning and the silence of the universe.
The characters fight to escape the town; we fight to escape our own insignificance.
And in both cases, the walls only grow higher.
4. Victor: The Man Who Stopped Running
Among all the chaos stands Victor, a quiet man who paints, eats, sleeps, and lives as if the nightmare around him doesn’t exist.
He doesn’t search for exits. He calls the town home.
He is not free from the place, but he is free within it.
Victor has achieved what the philosophers dreamed of: acceptance.
He doesn’t fight the absurd; he lives alongside it.
He is Camus’s Sisyphus smiling at the boulder, Dostoevsky’s idiot finding grace in madness, Kafka’s man who stopped knocking at the locked door.
He knows the truth that others fear:
“Maybe there is no way out — only a way through.”
And through it is where peace begins.
5. The World as a Haunted Village
If you look closely, our world isn’t so different.
We are born through an unknown tree. We wander roads that lead back to where we started. Inner monsters haunt us. And we mistake motion for meaning.
The town in From is a microcosm of existence.
It shows us that the absolute horror is not death or confinement, but it’s awareness.
To be conscious enough to question, yet powerless to know the answer.
Sylvia Plath captured it beautifully:
“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
That dark thing isn’t evil, but it’s being.
The unbearable awareness that everything, joy, grief, birth, and death, may all be just shadows flickering inside a dream we didn’t choose.
6. Conclusion: The Victor Within Us
Maybe From isn’t just fiction. Perhaps it’s a prophecy, a mirror held up to humanity, showing us that our search for meaning, our fear of monsters, and our longing for home are all part of the same story, repeating endlessly.
And perhaps the lesson is this:
Stop fighting the loop. Live inside it.
Find beauty in the confusion. Peace in the absurd.
Because maybe there’s no “outside” after all.
Perhaps this, this mysterious, haunted, shimmering world is home...