WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Devs, now streaming on FX on Hulu.

Alex Garland has always loved producing high-concept, thought-provoking content. As an author, his work on The Beach tugged at those suffering existential crises, while The Tesseract looked at  butterfly effects. As a film writer, he'd later dissect the debate between science and religion in Sunshine, and then as a director in the A.I.-driven Ex Machina.

Now, hot on the heels of Annihilation, where he detailed humanity as an infection, Garland is once again making waves with his first foray into television, Devs. However, while the trailers teased sharp statement-making sci-fi regarding web developers in a time where the digital industry drives just about everything, in the two episodes so far, it actually has more of a shocking horror aesthetic to it than anything else.

RELATED: Devs Is a Slow But Gorgeous Sci-Fi Meditation

DEVS "Episode 1" (Airs Thursday, March 5) -- Pictured: Karl Glusman as Segei. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX

Make no mistake, the sci-fi elements that comprise Garland's signature are there as we focus on Sergei (Karl Glusman), a coder, who moves from using data to predict the behavior of living organisms to someone the tech mogul Forest (Nick Offerman) wants in his special Devs project at his company, Amaya. The true purpose of this programming-tank is kept mysterious but after just one day, Sergei's mind is seemingly broken by the code being developed there. As he tells his ice-cold and somewhat inhuman colleague, Katie (Allison Pill), "this changes everything," only for her to retort "it changes absolutely nothing," you know you're in for a mind-bender.

Sergei proceeds to break down and throw up in the washroom and we're left guessing what secret Garland has being cooked up here in the lab, which is basically a huge concrete building with Faraday cages and a vacuum-sealed air gap. It looks like something right out of Blade Runner 2049, with its gold-plated walls even throwing nods to a Zelda temple. Forest confirms it's not a national security lab or anything dealing with robotics., so at this point, the scope of the project keeps our science minds ticking as to what hardware or software is being developed. It's even more alarming when Sergei uses his watch to store and steal code, which Forest warned him about earlier, as the only rule is to bring nothing and take nothing away when entering and leaving the complex.

RELATED: Devs: Everything You Need to Know About Alex Garland's First TV Series

It's right then and there the series goes into full-blown horror territory because as Sergei attempts to leave in the surrounding redwoods at night, in the halo-lit forest Forest is waiting like a more sinister version of Lex Luthor. He calmly intimidates Sergei about trying to steal his code, making it known it's "deterministic" and that no matter what, his plans have to generate one outcome. He can't let Sergei mess that up but still, he forgives him for his transgression. A panicked Sergei darts off, though, only to be grabbed by Zach Grenier's Kenton, Amaya's security chief. The young lad's restrained and a plastic bag is placed over his face, suffocating him as his boss looks on without flinching. Again, this tone of shattered emotion is one we've seen in Annihilation with grotesque creatures hunting mankind in a quarantined zone, but this is way more direct and aggressive, truly making humans the monsters. And for reasons we don't know why just yet.

In the second episode, it gets scarier because as Sergei's engineer girlfriend, Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), who works at Amaya's encryption department, starts looking for her missing boyfriend, Garland paints a much more cerebral picture of just how far Forest and Kenton will go to protect their dark secret. We see video evidence of Sergei lighting himself on fire near the Amaya campus, which all fingers point to, you guessed it, fabricated footage and a conspiracy. Lily, still in disbelief, hacks Sergei's phone and is contacted by a Russian handler, Anton, who reveals her boyfriend was supposed to infiltrate the company and extract secrets for his people. Little do they know Kenton's spying on them, only for the cyber-espionage plot to thicken when Kenton confronts Anton in a parkade. As Kenton gets stabbed, they grapple with each other in what can best be described as tech-terror, especially with the buzzing, haunting soundscape on tap. Ultimately, the fight ends with a bloodied, badly-wounded Kenton pressing Anton's neck against a car tire, snapping it, and contemplating the next move forward.

RELATED: Alex Garland’s DEVS Offers Early Look Into the Technological Mystery

It gets even more claustrophobic by the end when Lily tries to put subliminal signs in the form of clothes on a chair near her window, thinking Anton would see it as he told her this would be the calling card to use if she wants to work with him as his new inside man. After all, the shot of her crying and seeing Sergei's charred body has spurred her into action, realizing there's a mystery at hand that has to be exposed. Unfortunately, it's a message Sergei will never get and at this point, while it's not monsters, aliens or rogue robots, you can tell Garland is all about giving us a tension-ridden, creepy cyber-thriller way more violent than the counterpart it might be compared to most, Mr. Robot. And if Amaya is going to be used as a means to personal salvation for Forest, as clues have indicated, Kenton will continue to murder to keep the project on track.

The first two episodes of DEVS, entirely written, directed, and edited by Alex Garland, are streaming on FX on Hulu. It stars Nick Offerman, Alison Pill, Sonoya Mizuno, Jin Ha, Zach Grenier, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Karl Glusman and Cailee Spaeny. New episodes will be released every Thursday.