Landscape With Invisible Hand

If you've seen the trailer of Landscape With Invisible Hand, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was a quirky comedy about highs choolers Chloe (Rogers) and Adam (Blackk) livestreaming their relationship to an audience of short, squat aliens fascinated by the idea of human love. But this is the latest film from Cory Finley, who so deliciously dissected America's unmentioned aristocracies in Thoroughbreds before exploring low-grade corruption in HBO's 2019 true-crime flick Bad Education. Of course there's more going on here than some mawkish sci-fi rom-com.

Instead, it's an incisive, intriguing, and ultimately moving look at America's ongoing socioeconomic collapse: The whole "kids streaming their first slow dance" thing is just one aspect of this rich and nuanced drama.

Earth has been invaded by the Vuvv, but they're not the villains. Instead, the true source of destruction is cost cutting: The aliens turned up and, with their advanced technology, were able to underbid every contract on Earth. Flash forward to 2036, and now they effectively run and own everything. The implication is that humans not only let this happen but embraced it. After all, the Vuvv (a perfectly 1950s pulp alien design, a chimera of pug, squid, and ottoman) could easily be drop-kicked back into the sky. However, through the soft power of the market, humanity has allowed itself to fall completely to the bottom of the pecking order, scrabbling for the last crumbs. Seem familiar?

Aspiring artist Adam's family is doing better than most, as his mother (an excellently brittle Haddish) has managed to keep their house. Chloe and her brother (Gandolfini, a picture of seething sociological embitterment) are bouncing between cars, hotels, and the street as their milquetoast father (Hamilton, touchingly pathetic) clutches the last traces of his dignity. Livestreaming their dates through headsets to the Vuvv is just one way for Adam and Chloe to adapt to the new economy.

As with Thoroughbreds' scathing insights on the immutable nature of class in America, writer/director Finley gently pushes the audience to stare into the abyss of our own incoming economic tsunami: In his all-too-familiar near future, everyone's a buggy whip manufacturer in a world of automobiles, and the individual tragedies facing Adam and those around him all come from their desperate attempts to handle their economic hardships. His script, adapted from M.T. Anderson's darkly satirical 2017 novel, takes on a multiplicity of modern evils and realities, everything from growing up terminally online to the gig economy to corporate art. Yet Landscape With Invisible Hand never seems scattershot because – as with Thoroughbreds – Finley keeps the characters grounded amid the insanity. Moreover, he never loses sight of his central conceit: that we always need to remember that the mega-rich, as embodied by the Vuvv, are so far removed from daily concerns that it's a mistake to consider them human.