Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina) plays Lily, a young employee at Amaya who commutes cozily to work from San Francisco each day on the company bus with her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman). In the first episode, Sergei is handpicked by Forest to join “devs,” Amaya’s top-secret development initiative. The story unfolds in obtuse layers: Sergei’s walk down a (literal) garden path toward devs’ concrete-sealed headquarters; his introduction to the code that spells out what devs actually does; his visceral shock in response. By the time Sergei goes missing, viewers have seen enough to know that the “official” security footage of his dramatic self-immolation at the feet of Amaya’s enormous child idol is entirely unreliable.

Devs is only the latest in a series of puzzle-box shows more preoccupied with their own cleverness and their labyrinthine twists than with the burden of watchability. The past two seasons of Westworld have prized complexity over coherence; the work of Sam Esmail, specifically USA’s Mr. Robot and Amazon’s Homecoming, has set a tone for jarring, dour auteur-driven drama. Garland’s own style is distinct (think the chilling, philosophical agitations of Ex Machina or the vivid eco-horror of Annihilation), and yet the director seems to have come to television, like so many of his film peers, with little sense of what the medium offers other than extra time. The mysteries of Devs don’t unspool so much as eke out in a torturously slow drip. And the show’s aesthetic details—the score by Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, the Kubrickian jumps and color-blocked portrait shots—feel so detached from the story that they’re often insufferable.

The overarching theme within Devs is the relationship between data and determinism. The more data tell us about ourselves, the more we can predict human behavior and the more free will is eroded, Garland suggests. Forest and his deputy, Katie (Alison Pill), talk about the delineations and divides within determinist theory in surprising detail (although the show’s casual treatment of quantum computing and the meaning of the multiverse might send you straight to Google). The universe, Forest explains to Sergei in the first episode, is “godless and neutral and defined only by physical laws.” Humans “fall into an illusion of free will,” he argues, “because the tramlines are invisible.” But they’re there, all the same.

Oddly, Garland seems flummoxed by simpler dialogue. “Sir, you’ve got more money than God,” an employee tells Forest. “You think I care about money?” he replies. “You did once.” “Well now I don’t.” Lily’s ex-boyfriend tells her, “I know you. You do stuff. The stuff other people only think about, you go ahead and do it.” By the time a character in the final episode trots out the old “Don’t blame me; it was predetermined” excuse, it’s hard to believe that these characters are human beings at all.

Garland was an art-history major, and Devs leans heavily on the idea that art in particular is what separates humans from advanced artificial intelligence. A pivotal character quotes Larkin and Yeats and cites Bach and Coltrane as the pinnacle of human significance. So it’s ironic that Devs is so robotic. Interactions between characters are as languid and ambiguous as a Harold Pinter play, without the accompanying tension. If Garland is trying to make the point that working in tech has robbed these people of their soul, he’s succeeded. But he has also left his show devoid of animation, of passion, of any emotion that might pull the story out of the automated culture he’s trying to indict.