About halfway through the new “FX on Hulu” mini-series Devs (premiering on Hulu on March 5), one reaches a fork in the road. After four or so episodes, the series has been alternately intriguing and plodding. Its science fiction is interesting but confusing, and some muted performances have halted the show’s momentum. One could, in all justification, abandon the series; who’s got time for something that’s stylish but so withholding? Or, of course, one could stick with the series to see how it ends.

I wouldn’t blame you for giving up—but I chose the latter path, because I had to for my job. But also because the series’s creator, and sole writer and director, Alex Garland, has earned the patience.

For fans of Garland’s films Ex Machina and Annihilation—both gorgeous, arrestingly dark sci-fi thrillers about existential dread—Devs offers the exciting opportunity to see him work longform. With a run time of six-ish hours, Garland can truly explore one of his worlds, rendered with polished aesthetics and fueled by a hungry intellect. There were some moments watching Devs—so intense and saturated—when I began to wonder if maybe a little bit of Garland goes a long way. For the most part, though, it proves a strange, somber pleasure to wander the corridors of his mind for such a long time.

At first glance, Devs is perhaps too reminiscent of The Circle, Dave Eggers’s techno alarmist thriller about a big social media company and its cheery plan to take over the world. Well, I say alarmist, and yet Eggers has been proven right on a lot of points since the book came out. (There was an unfortunate film adaptation; the less said of it, the better.) Like in that novel, Devs concerns a young woman, Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), who works on the campus of a large and looming tech company in the Bay Area. But unlike in The Circle, the company in Devs—called Amaya—is immediately sinister, a secretive organization whose very buildings thrum with menacing omnipotence.

And, well, we also know the company is bad because in the first episode we see its head of security kill someone, a murder then staged to look like a suicide that sets the plot in motion. Lily goes in search of answers, as we in the audience do, and in that pursuit we come to realize that the technology at the center of Amaya’s mission threatens—or promises?—to disrupt everything we know about human existence.

Garland is aiming at big stuff here, using deterministic philosophy and quantum computing to ponder how the virtual and the actual relate and connect to one another. That’s all I’ll say about what’s really going on in Devs—for fear of spoilers, yes, but also because I don’t totally understand what the show is talking about a lot of the time. Still, I don’t begrudge Garland for indulging his brainy fascinations, nor for challenging his audience.

In its capacity as a thriller, Devs is quietly brutal. As various people involved with the mystery are bluntly dispatched, Garland makes a grim point about the sociopathy of technological progress, which seems to further and further reduce the standing of humanity in its calculations. Garland is careful not to make things too miserable, but if you’re looking for a respite from the daily crush of tech anxiety, Devs will offer no comfort. The goal here instead is to prickle our minds into alertness, to force us to consider what the end result of all this relentless advancement might actually be.