Alex Garland is an auteur fulfilling a growing need. As Time magazine recently put it, Garland’s “ascendance from buzzy young author to A-list filmmaker has coincided with an intensifying ambient sense that we’re living in the End Times.”

As we navigate our way through the apocalypse, there’s no doubt we crave media that reflects that experience. During the early days of coronavirus, lists were drawn up and eagerly shared evaluating how closely our new reality approximates the pandemics in films like Contagion, Outbreak, World War Z, and Children of Men.

Garland has done only one pan­demic film: the excellent script for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), about PETA-like activists who unwittingly unleash a zombie-esque “rage” virus. But in his films Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018) — and in his new FX miniseries Devs — he’s consistently focused on the moment in our near future when we confront just what exactly may lie beyond our time on Earth.