I Don't Understand "Devs"

I was looking forward to this miniseries, Alex Garland's first foray into television for FX and Hulu. I liked his two recent features, "Ex Machina" and "Annihilation," for their unusually heady takes on science-fiction horror stories. "Devs" initially fits right in line with those films. It stars Sonoya Mizuno as Lily Chan, an employee of the Googlesque tech giant Amaya. Her co-worker and boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman) is one day recruited for the company's secret "Devs" division by company founder Forest (Nick Offerman) and Devs chief Katie (Alison Pill). Sergei soon ends up dead, leaving Lily with a mystery to unravel. Other characters include Amaya's head of security Kenton (Zach Grenier), Lily's ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha), and Devs employees Lyndon (Cailee Spaemy) and Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson).

However, "Devs" turned out to be much less straightforward and more cerebral than anything I've seen from Garland. The story is slow paced and works best as a moody techno-thriller, but only up to a point. There are some fascinating characters, and some sequences of great suspense and horror, but at the same time it's difficult to follow what the characters' motivations and desires are. I'm not smart enough to understand what's going on in "Devs" all the time, because the story relies heavily on concepts taken from theoretical and experimental physics that I can't always follow. A major theme is the idea of determinism - that all our actions conform to a predetermined script - and how certain characters seek to undermine, enforce, or work around it. However, the corresponding human drama is too often similarly impenetrable - I'm still not entirely sure what was driving the show's major villain.

"Devs" is a better show to enjoy for its aesthetics and particular brooding mood. There are so many strange and interesting things to look at, from the giant statue of a toddler in the woods, to the pulsing golden interiors of the Devs building, to the episode where we see multiple versions of characters in various scenes, representing how various timelines could have played out. The soundtrack is mesmeric and intriguing. The show takes the common elements we associate with Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook and Google, and gives them a sinister twist - the guru-like CEO with a cult of personality, the Bay Area environs, the security paranoia, and the unsettling corporate culture. Even television static can be made to be fascinating and difficult to look away from. Unfortunately, the atmospherics are often obtuse to the point of absurdity. Everyone talks slowly and deliberately, often saying sinister things without much substance - or too much substance. We eventually find out exactly what Devs is doing, but the implications often feel weirdly unconnected to the actual mystery that's driving Lily.

And speaking of Lily, she's a hard character to root for. It's strange, because Sonoya Mizuno gave some perfectly fine performances in other genre media recently, but gets nowhere with trying to make Lily sympathetic and heroic. There's something very introverted and interior about Lily that makes her difficult to connect with. She reminds me a lot of Rami Malek's Elliot Alderson from "Mr. Robot," except without the narration that really grounded that character and made him so relatable. Lily, stuck with a lot of long silences and seemingly impetuous choices, is often more of a mystery than the tangle of corporate espionage that she's trying to penetrate. What's more, other characters are constantly telling her she's special, but Lily never manages to demonstrate why to my satisfaction.

So, "Devs" looks spectacular and has sky high ambitions in delivering hard science-fiction. For the first few episodes, a strong supporting cast and the excellent production values manage to keep it humming along. However, it doesn't keep the momentum up in the second half, as the series gets deeper and deeper into mind games, and the characters reveal themselves to be much flimsier than they originally appeared. Allison Pill and Nick Offerman really deserve some kind of award for exuding so much calm creepiness that, sadly, doesn't amount to very much. I feel the ending of "Devs" was properly botched, not because it was difficult to understand (which it was), but because it was so keen to answer questions that the series did a terrible job of getting us invested in to begin with.

I'm all for Alex Garland getting more opportunities to blow our minds, but this was a project that should have stayed on the drawing board.
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