Landscape with Invisible Hand (2023)

Landscape with Invisible Hand review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The dystopian future of a darkly comedic alien invasion presented in Landscape with Invisible Hand starts strong but gets lost in exploring its many themes. There’s so much ground that it tries to cover: capitalism, automation, class, art, family, romance, and economic despair are all graced. But in trying to cover so much of this material through a sci-fi allegory, this film plays like a late-stage capitalism for dummies, where there are unique topics worth exploring, but it feels like the real meat of this tale is in other books, maybe even the book the film is based on.

Taking place on an alternative Earth, the planet has been taken over by crab-like alien creatures known as the Vuvv. Looking like ridiculous sea creatures, the Vuvv don’t control the Earth with a violent war but by appealing to corporate interests. The species is fascinated by humans and their approach to labor, aiming to exploit this aspect of their culture for their own. This leads to the Vuvv sharing more of their tech to further automate everything from production to education, directing all of humanity’s efforts towards understanding and adding to Vuvv culture, learning the language and customs.

Caught up in this hopeless future is Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk), a teenager living with his single mom, Beth (Tiffany Haddish), and sister, Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie). They barely hang onto their home as Beth struggles to make ends meet. They need more money and find any means of acquiring extra cash. Beth reluctantly takes on a homeless family, hoping they’ll be able to pay rent. Among that family is Chloe (Kylie Rogers), a teenage classmate of Adam who has an idea on how to make some cash. Vuvvs apparently love watching human teenagers form a romance and will gladly pay to watch their lives unfold. This leads to Adam and Chloe forming a pseudo-romance to make money for both their families. It works until the Vuvvs catch on and realize their romance is not genuine, looking down on humans for faking this emotion.

Had the film focused on this one aspect, it might have been compelling if there was something to say about the uncomfortable commodification of love and the human experience. Instead, the film takes the easy way out by shifting its attention away to other aspects. Beth tries to make amends with the dissatisfied Vuvv by agreeing to allow one of them to live with her as a husband. Although the Vuvv seem to crave authentic human emotions, they really only crave the artificial one that sells most. This becomes evident in how Beth’s marriage-for-money counterpart is obsessed with only family sitcoms and tries to stylize the household dynamic in a similar manner. Meanwhile, Adam turns his attention towards art while also feeling less valid after a brief and bitter encounter with his flighty father (William Jackson Harper). All of this weirdness leads to Adam’s art being grossly bought and altered for Vuvv culture, leading his family to make the tough call of living in poverty rather than sell out on their values.

There is some good stuff in this film, and some is delightfully absurd. I loved the bizarre Vuvv language method involving palm-scrapings too intricate for any human to learn perfectly. The eerie nature of the Vuvv’s existing as a sort of faceless entity of capitalism’s demands makes them the perfect antagonists for this picture. Even some smiles cross my face when Tiffany Haddish grows annoyed with her Vuvv husband and tells him off in the most satisfying way possible. But in all the many subplots that get tossed at the screen, it feels like only the most bare-bones themes are acknowledged before moving on to the next part of the Vuvv that represents the decaying landscape of an Earth that embraced capitalism to its most inhuman levels of exploitation.

Landscape with Invisible Hand is a fine first film for teenagers just starting to realize the decay of late-stage capitalism, playing like a light, young adult version of Sorry To Bother You. While it never quite reaches those same levels of absurdity, it benefits from having a more genuine emotional core of a family broken by economic forces that seek to dominate their personal life and shake their bonds. While that emotional core remains firm, the thematic messaging gets sloppy to the point where the finale’s focus on art ends mildly unsatisfyingly. This is a good starter film for parents trying to raise their tweens and teens to be more critical of the economic systems they’re forced into. But once those kids get a hold of something more vicious like Sorry To Bother You or The Last Black Man in San Fransisco, they’ll realize this movie is only half the film of these more scathing critiques.