‘Landscape with Invisible Hand’ is an alien invasion movie with a twist

The new movie Landscape with Invisible Hand, out in theaters this weekend, is about an alien invasion, but not in any way we’ve seen alien invasions portrayed on screen before.

“This is not your typical big, scary military alien invasion,” director Cory Finley tells ABC Audio. “This is a purely economic alien invasion by means of the free market. So this is aliens who have come down and they just make everything we make better than we make it. They drive all humans out of work and they slowly take over our economy that way.”

Adds Finley, “[It’s] the story of a young artist coming of age, finding his own voice, falling in and out of love, in a world that is subject to an alien invasion.”

“The aliens, who kind of control everything on Earth through economic power, are fascinated by human emotions, something they just don’t understand,” he explains. “They find it very exotic and interesting. And so human love, which is the most exotic of those emotions, has become this kind of valuable commodity.”

The focus is on two teens — played by Asante Blackk and Kylie Rogers — who form an instant bond, which intrigues the aliens, who then watch the couple like a reality show.

“As a form of kind of alien tourism, the main characters start doing what they call courtship broadcasting, and letting aliens watch and pay per minute as they fall in and out of love,” says Finley. “And I thought that was just subversive and strange and kind of [an] over-the-top metaphorical pressure cooker version of something we all know, particularly in this kind of age of social media and, you know, cameras everywhere wielded by our fellow humans.” 

Tiffany Haddish also stars.

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