In "Devs" Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) goes in search of her boyfriend - and discovers a world that turns everything that has been there up to now
Photo: FOX GroupThis is what someone looks like who just sees a world that is overturning everything known. Sergej's tears welled up in his wide open eyes, he is trembling all over. The young programmer looks at a long row of numbers on a screen, but for him a future emerges with unimaginable possibilities.
A code that pushes the limits of the human mind. A series that takes the viewer with it: "Devs" is a work of art that the genre of TV series has seldom produced so far. A feverish dream, a quantum melodrama, a meditation on the nature of the universe at the same time. But above all: an exciting, gripping story about people, power and the promises of new technologies. And their risks.
Katie (Alison Pill) developed the mysterious quantum computer in "Devs". But what is she going to do with it?
Photo:kurt iswarienko / FOX Group
Author, director and producer Alex Garland actually talks about loss: the software developer Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) is looking for her friend Sergei (Karl Glusman), who has disappeared without a trace. And that after an anything but everyday working day: Sergei had his first assignment in a mysterious department of the software company Amaya, for which Lily and Sergei work.
In this department called "Devs" - the name is an abbreviation for Developments - rumor has it that experiments are carried out with a quantum computer. However, only a handful of people know exactly what Amaya CEO Forest (Nick Offerman) is working on in a remote building secured by various security barriers.
While investigating Sergei's disappearance, Lily discovers that her boyfriend was a Russian spy and wanted to tell his contact about what was going on in "Devs". Forest, who is also marked by a traumatic experience of loss - he lost his wife and daughter in a car accident - initially supports Lily in her search. But soon it becomes increasingly clear that he has something to hide. With his ruthless chief of security, Kenton (Zach Grenier), he has an extremely effective tool for keeping secrets.
The Briton Alex Garland, 50, became known in the mid-1990s as an extremely illusion-free voice of the then Generation X and as the author of the novel "The Beach". The film adaptation made Leonardo DiCaprio a world star. In the meantime Garland has developed into one of the most important auteur filmmakers in the field of science fiction. His films "Ex Machina" and "Extinction" are considered milestones in the genre.
In "Devs" it becomes clear what a strong, recognizable signature Garland has developed in the meantime. Nature and technology stand side by side again. Tech guru Forest, like the robotics expert from "Ex Machina", has his company's futuristic buildings built in the middle of a forest, as if he had to ascertain his roots for himself. That looks fantastic, but emphasizes a contrast rather than a fusion.
The images in "Devs" seem even stronger than in Garland's earlier films, as if they were polished with steel wool, clear and clean, just before the point where they would tip over into artificiality. In front of the lens of Garland's regular cameraman Rob Hardy, San Francisco becomes a remote metropolis of tech dreams, it looks as if it has been doused with molten metal, unreal and hyperreal at the same time.
Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) also works in "Devs" - but is shocked when the voice of Jesus comes from the computer
Photo:kurt iswarienko / FOX Group
The echoes of Stanley Kubrick's classic "2001 - A Space Odyssey" are clearer than ever, and "Devs" can almost be read as an homage. Current TV series such as "Dark" and "Westworld", which deal with similarly complex techno-philosophical questions, also rush in the background.
What really excites about "Devs": Garland deliberately makes his eight-part series accessible to a mass audience by using a largely conventional series dramaturgy. He builds tension and irony, he plays with the possibilities that cliffhangers and episode structure offer. A difficult balance that he maintains and that makes "Devs" an organic whole.
Mainly because the series makes the border areas of the human thirst for knowledge and imagination tangible in a dramatic form. "Devs" is about quantum mechanics and the contrast between determinism and many-worlds theory. The question of whether our actions are determined solely by cause and effect - or whether there are an almost infinite number of variants of this action in an almost infinite number of copies of our world.
Above all, however, Garland asks what actually happens when mankind develops technologies whose effects they cannot foresee and do not understand? When people presume to understand highly complex machines without being aware of their own feelings?
Speaking to the Israeli historian Yuval Harari: Does man open a Pandora's box when he rises to Homo Deus? Does he initiate his own downfall if he plays God?
With "Devs", Alex Garland gives unsettling and ambiguous, but surprisingly concrete answers to these many questions. His masterful series is a philosophical treatise, a sensual experience and exciting science fiction.
Eight episodes, broadcast weekly. On Sky.
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