Time and again in Devs, free will clashes with fate. Even if you were shown exactly what will happen in the next minute, the next hour, the next da...
TIME Magazine March 9, 2020 Amid the glut of prestige TV, it turns out that a smart, experimental sci-fi show that knows entertainment value and depth aren’t mutual...
Independent December 6, 2021 C’mon C’mon is a great big bear hug wrapped in celluloid.
New York Times March 4, 2020 Personally, I found that ending a little empty and unsatisfying. Yet I didn’t regret going on the haunting philosophical forest walk it...
Rolling Stone March 4, 2020 I’m still not sure I know what the point of the Devs project is, but I loved watching Devs unfold.
Somewhere in Devs, there are relevant lessons to be learned about the misuse of technology and the age-old conflict between predestiny and free wil...
Vanity Fair March 5, 2020 [Alex Garland’s] work offers a bracing jolt that then lingers like a haunting.
You would go into scenes genuinely unsure of their outcome, then realize Garland has led you to that single point all along. He makes the eight hou...
RogerEbert.com March 4, 2020 A daring and new deconstruction of one of the basic tenets of human existence.
Slant Magazine March 23, 2020 The series’s synthesis of aesthetic, plot, and subtext slowly starts to pull apart in its exposition-heavy second half.
The Guardian March 5, 2020 [A] mostly well-plotted and delicately paced drip-feed of information.
indieWire February 18, 2020 Garland uses his time wisely, and his beautiful vision of a ghastly future is undeniably insightful. Some of its ideas may not be welcome ...
The problem, from a pure storytelling point of view, is that the show’s tone, characters and narrative momentum have all surrendered to...
Devs is a sci-fi detective story with a philosophical bent. And it balances those elements extremely well, even if it moves rather slowly.
The tone is paramount – listen on headphones if possible. And the visuals are arresting. (If you must watch on a laptop, lie on the couch...
Financial Times April 10, 2020 Beneath the high concepts lie the rawest, most basic of human emotions. Mizuno, warily composed one minute, snottily sobbing the next, is magnetic.
The Guardian April 16, 2020 It’s a deep, dark, wild ride. How much of it deals in pure imagination and how much of it is grounded in stuff already here I don&r...
Variety February 18, 2020 A product that delivers neither the wildly creative sense of tech’s possibilities nor the ground-level excavation of his characters… Devs is...
Times (UK) April 16, 2020 I’m feeling a bit meh about it all. The problem with brilliant, original characters, I suppose, is that the harder they hit, the more fa...
Hollywood Reporter February 25, 2020 It’s haunting and hypnotic, a show of marrow-seeping mood and a unity of vision that carries through every frame. If it also turns a corner f...
Watching Devs I quickly learned it’s possible to be entirely gripped by a show while simultaneously not having a clue what’s going...
The deliberately unbalanced feel of it might be off-putting… But I assure you, don’t back off or you’ll miss what is, for all of i...
Paste Magazine February 28, 2020 In our world, things might get a little messier, a little bleaker; but no less interesting, for better or worse. Devs has its elements of mess...
The Atlantic March 11, 2020 This is a zanier, sillier Westworld, and much more entertaining for it.
Boston Globe March 5, 2020 "Devs" is a cerebral pleasure that gets very philosophical and presses its brainy atmosphere with lots of ponderous soundtrack music and deadp...
Some will surely watch "Devs" twice. That’s my prediction of the series' future, and I feel confident making it.
A mind-blowing concept that doesn’t entirely come together at the close, but which remains unsettling and provocative throughout.
The show is what it wants to be, but what it wants to be put me in mind of the big whiffs of the immediate post-Sopranos era, a hefty, pretentious...
Garland has come to the small screen with a limited series that furthers the director’s thoughts on technology while both failing as a t...
News.com.au April 6, 2020 Devs' magnetism is undeniable, and you feel yourself giving in even if you’re completely lost
Times (UK) April 16, 2020 It’s probably a Marmite drama, but in its preoccupation with being clever-clever and abstruse, it has made its characters too insipid an...
Of course the characters don’t have free will. That would require imagination, something Devs can only simulate.