'Devs' Finale: The story's genius is debatable but how Alex Garland uses visuals is a work of art
Spoilers for ‘Devs’ Season 1 Episode 8
A lot has been said and continues to be said about Alex Garland’s eight-part miniseries ‘Devs’. The show heavily relies on philosophies of determinism and fatalism and tells a compelling story that involves messiah complexes, biblical symbolism, technophobia, tangent universes and the idea of fate.
The finale that aired on April 16 can easily be called one of the better television finales in recent times and while it’s subjective if it was a happy ending or if it was more insidious than it looks, we have to talk about the atmosphere Garland creates with the show’s visuals and even the sound.
The golden walls of the Devs lab, the flowing lights, the ethereal score, especially when Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) and Forest (Nick Offerman) die, prove to be simultaneously mesmerizing and unsettling. It feels like slowly letting go of reality, falling deeper into a state of hypnosis, but holding on to just enough consciousness to realize something is not right.
But even outside this feverish dream of a visual is visual architecture so beautiful, you often get caught off guard. Unlike a lot of the science fiction we see, where the aesthetics rely heavily on a mix of cyberpunk and neo-futurisms, 'Devs' chooses to be more visually tranquil. While the neo-futurisms exist in Garland’s vision, it’s presented in a minimalist way.
The show is set in what looks like San Francisco, but there’s always an eerie calm over the city. The usual fast-pace of futures designed by writers and artists is conspicuously missing from the picture in ‘Devs’. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this in Garland’s work. ‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Annihilation’ both had these subtleties, even if in different styles.
And in the midst of this unnervingly calm cityscape that has a decidedly oriental vibe (and the score sort of only reinforces that feeling), are unexpected imageries. And that is where viewers are caught off guard. For example, there’s the giant Amaya statue that lords over everyone. There are the trees with halos of light surrounding their bark's circumference.
Garland, speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, talked about these surreal images. “[Amaya Mizuno-André, the little girl who plays Amaya] has this look of slight confusion and wonder, and she’s cupping her hands. It just seemed perfect. The original idea was, ‘How can this guy Forest show the extent of his devotion as massively as possible, given the infinite wealth of these huge tech companies, and the way they’re given to huge statements about themselves?’ So the statue and all the iconography the girl creates seemed right for that,” he said.
Garland even explained his overt use of gold in the series, especially in the Devs lab: “I tend to see science as being weird and mysterious and lyrical. So the physical environment needed to reflect that.” The effect is quite as he intends. For a show that’s science fiction, the visual theme is almost always mystical, be it the golden rooms, the giant statue, the breeze-caressed ferns, or even the perpetually-foggy, twilight around the cityscape.
Garland uses light, natural and artificial, to his advantage in every part of the story. Even in the grimmest of scenes, there is no darkness trying to accentuate the effect. On the contrary, the merrily-lit golden rooms or the bright outdoors serve only as a stark contradiction to what’s happening. It’s somewhat similar to the effect Ari Aster creates in his 2019 horror film, ‘Midsommar’, but again, more subtle, just like all of what Garland does.
That ‘Devs’ is a masterpiece of a story is debatable, personally, I loved it, but many found the plot falling into tropes and at times, too convoluted. But one thing that everyone should be able to agree with is that ‘Devs’ as just a visual project is nothing but awesome. From mystical to ominous to avant-garde, it hits all the right notes.