Landscape with Invisible Hand
Written and directed by Cory Finley
Starring Asante Blackk, Kylie Rogers, and Tiffany Haddish
Runtime: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Rated R
In theaters August 18th

by Joe Carlough, Staff Writer

Landscape with Invisible Hand is a charming sci-fi comedy drama about the inextricable tie between art and humanity. What the movie sometimes lacks in pacing, it makes up for in heart, ultimate message, and electric performances out of each of its actors. 

The movie follows Adam (Asante Blackk) as he and Chloe (Kylie Rogers) begin to broadcast their budding relationship to a benevolent alien species, the Vuvv, who have taken control of Earth. The Vuvv, with their incredibly advanced technology, have made most human work redundant, and many humans now mill about listlessly, with no work and deteriorating living conditions. The Vuvv, themselves largely devoid of emotion, are obsessed with human love, and will pay to watch authentic relationships grow, a smart critique of our culture’s current obsession with live streaming our everyday lives. As Adam and Chloe begin to sour on each other, their viewership declines, causing them (and their families, each perfectly cast in the way they play off each other) to make ever-increasingly odd and desperate decisions to stay afloat in this new world. 

The story, silly as it sounds, is handled with care and attention, mirroring my favorite video games released by the film’s production company Annapurna Pictures’ video games arm, Annapurna Interactive. I’m reminded of the hours I spent playing Stray, in which you navigate a post-human world of robots as a cat. While their games feel so cinematic and involved you could fairly compare them to playing a movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand is so full of character and whimsy you could compare it to watching a fully realized video game. Details like the headpieces the students wear to receive from and broadcast to the Vuvv are uniquely decorated by each student, and some of the scenes, like watching the two kids ride across a golf course floating in the sky on a golf cart driven by an eyebrow-less man, are so imaginative and odd they’d almost make more sense if they were in the form of a pixelated cut scene. The Vuvv themselves look like charming aliens you’d expect to see using speech bubbles in a strange game biome instead of real life. 

Which leads me to wonder: who are the Vuvv? Yes, they’re aliens, but how deeply can we trace their lineage based on the extremely limited information we’re given in the movie? I have a theory that the Vuvv are a highly evolved version of the human that, through technological efficiency, have grown to forget their humanity, what made them human in the first place. My reasoning behind this idea? Crabs. Some evolutionary biologists theorize that crab bodies seem nearly perfectly evolved for their environment, which is why all crustaceans have evolved to have one form or another of crab bodies. This is, of course, a gross understatement of the ideas first described by biologist L. A. Borradaile in 1916, and later expanded on by Wolfe, Luque, and Bracken-Grissom in their paper “How to Become a Crab: Phenotypic constraints on a recurring body plan,” but it’s an interesting idea to toy with as I observe the Vuvv and their fleshy, crab/man bodies: the eyestalks, the flipper-like legs, the butt-like mandible mouths. Could the aliens find intense fascination with human love, art, and emotion because, deep in the primordial parts of their minds, they once were human? I don’t know, but you’ll have to watch the movie and let me know what you think. 

I expected to enjoy Landscape with Invisible Hand, but I didn’t expect to experience the range of emotions I did while watching. An expertly crafted film, I’m already excited to see it again and introduce it of my movie-loving friends.