‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’ Is a Wry Critique of Late Stage Capitalism

You might be wondering why Landscape With Invisible Hand has such an unwieldy title. I certainly did, walking into a movie I had assumed, based on the trailer, would be a clever little allegory about reality TV and social media influencing, set to a backdrop of alien invasion. I wondered: Shouldn’t any movie that prominently features squishy little pink slug creatures have a punchier name than this?

An hour and 45 minutes later, I realized the title was, in fact, perfect. (Those who’ve already read the M.T. Anderson novel it’s based on might agree.) This movie doesn’t just do the thing you think it’s going to. It slowly and steadily bombards you with analogies — about gentrification, racism, colonialism, education, othering, moral compromises, information filtering — until you thoroughly realize what the invisible hand in the title is. And no, it has nothing to do with aliens.

The story begins as aspiring artist Adam (the wonderful Asante Blackk, best known for his role in This is Us) connects with a new girl at his school, Chloe (Kylie Rogers), who has a fondness for scavenging in junkyards. The two share an easy rapport and a similarly frustrated-but-reconciled approach to the fact that alien overlords — a group known as the Vuvv — have made the teens’ futures bleak and their family’s lives enormously difficult. The Vuvv, incidentally, live on luxurious islands that hang low in Earth’s airspace, frequently blocking humanity’s view of the sky.

As the two begin to date, Chloe comes up with the idea to broadcast their “courtship” to the Vuvv, a species that reproduces asexually and is fascinated by human romantic relationships — or, at least, 1950s sitcom versions thereof. The Vuvv pay couples for broadcasts of their dating lives according to how popular they are and how many followers they have. Chloe and Adam quickly rake in enough money to buy their families small luxuries like actual meat and vegetables, as opposed to what everyone else on Earth eats now — synthetic food cubes printed by the Vuvv.

When cracks start to appear in their relationship, the Vuvv accuse Chloe and Adam of fraud and threaten to force their families into poverty for the next six generations. To avoid this, Chloe, Adam and their respective family members must figure out ways to appease the aliens. Their attempts to do so create a series of absurd but unsettling events that ultimately say more about how humans survive today than how we might endure an imaginary future under occupying aliens.

Landscape With Invisible Hand is dense with commentary on just about all of the terrible things humans do — to each other and ourselves — because of money, social class and status. A nice touch in this tale is the fact that the Vuvv were actively welcomed by the human race, enticed by the promise of better technology and easier lives. It’s an entirely plausible premise that highlights our shortsighted nature beautifully.

It helps, too, that the cast of Landscape With Invisible Hand is brilliant across the board. Tiffany Haddish, as Adam’s industrious mother, brings a realistic grounding to proceedings even as her storyline veers into particularly bizarre territory. As Chloe’s father, The Walking Dead‘s Josh Hamilton is the ideal combination of snide and desperate as his place in the world prompts his ever-growing resentments to boil over. At the center of it all, Blackk and Rogers convincingly paint the picture of a love that may have had real potential if not for being interrupted by the pressures of financial destitution.

You’ll come out of Landscape With Invisible Hand wholly entertained, but not a little queasy. With the exception of Sorry to Bother You, it’s hard to think of another movie that so thoroughly explores the perniciousness of late-stage capitalism with such verve and humor. It’ll leave you questioning the very fabric upon which our modern world is built.

‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’ is released nationwide on Aug. 18, 2023.