Landscape with Invisible Hand is a darkly funny economic allegory

Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.

Making authentic art in a capitalist economy has never been easy, but it’s uniquely hard right now. SAG and the WGA are both on strike for the first time since the 60s. The WGA has been on the picket lines for the longest stretch in the organization’s history. Studios refuse to pay a living wage to the people who create the art their businesses distribute. Streamers refuse to share data on how many people have actually engaged with the art they produce, for reasons they don’t want to explain. 

Hanging over all of it is the threat of artificial intelligence, which larger studios are already trying to use to automate processes that really should be performed by someone with a soul (in the case of Warner Brothers, deciding what projects get approved to be made). If you’re someone who wants to share your imagination or perspective with other people, never mind make a living doing it, this is a frustrating, uncertain predicament that doesn’t show signs of changing any time soon.

Thoroughbreds and Bad Education director Corey Finley’s latest film, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is about a young artist living through an alien invasion, not about robots taking over. However, Finley’s film makes an effective metaphor for what it feels like to be made useless by technology and having to kowtow to corporate overlords who fundamentally don’t understand key facets of the human experience. It’s not a tidy movie, but the fact that it isn’t makes it a more authentic—if exceedingly strange—cultural artifact depicting how it feels to be alive at this moment in history.

Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk) is a high schooler and aspiring artist living in 2036, three years after an alien species called the Vuvv made contact with Earth and effectively took over everything by convincing humanity to cooperate with them. Those who can afford to now live alongside the Vuvv — which resemble Daniel Johnston’s iconic “Hi, How Are You” alien — on floating luxury real estate developments. The Campbell family, like many others, are stuck on the ground and struggle to get by. 

When new girl Chloe (Kylie Rogers) shows up at school, Adam invites her currently homeless family to live in his basement until they can get back on their feet, to the frustration of Adam’s mother (Tiffany Haddish). As a way of making money to support their new joint household, Chloe suggests she and Adam try doing a “courtship broadcast,” in which they pretend to date and stream their relationship for the Vuvv to watch on their mothership. The pair make good money with their venture, until the aliens figure out the two teenagers aren’t really in love.

Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.

Landscape with Invisible Hand is divided into distinct chapters in Adam’s life over the 18 month period the film covers, each one distinguished by one of Adam’s paintings depicting life during Vuvv occupation. It’s a surreal existence. School lessons are beamed to the kids using digital headsets. Learning the Vuvv language (which the aliens speak by rubbing their paddle-like hands together and sounds like a series of record scratches) is considered a benefit to getting a job. The Vuvv claim to have made things more efficient through the use of their technology, but have eliminated most traditional jobs in the process, making hustling for scarce low-wage positions so important that there’s not much room for critical thought or creative expression.

In addition to Adam and Chloe’s relationship, Finley’s film contains several threads that by themselves would make fine stories—there’s the dynamic between Adam’s family and Chloe’s anxious dad (Josh Hamilton) and angry brother (Michael Gandolfini). There’s a bizarre subplot in which Adam’s mom fake-marries a Vuvv so the alien can get a taste of human domestic life. Adam’s art becomes a point of interest for the Vuvv, and he briefly experiences the financial rush and creative disappointment of selling out.

Individually, these are great ideas. Smushed together as they are, however, Landscape with Invisible Hand loses a sense of structure that may leave audiences wondering what the greater point is. However, Finley threads a consistent theme throughout of what our current economy and obsession with streamlining at the cost of quality, authenticity and sustainability has left us with. It’s shot through with bitter (but funny) humor and a sense of deep, heavy sighing that’s relatable no matter what your experience has been over the last few years.

Landscape with Invisible Hand is a piece of knowing absurdism that may not always form a coherent narrative, but hits the nail on the head emotionally. It’s hard to imagine something this weird and all over the place finding a big audience. However, in a couple of decades, it’s going to be a valuable thing to look back on and remember what was on our mind back in 2023. That is, if our robot (or alien) overlords let us keep it on the approved media list.