Reviews
‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’ Sundance Review – A Melancholy Fable of Human Resilience
War of the Worlds. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Independence Day. Signs. All of these films depict alien invasions as they are happening, but what happens after the fact? And what if, by some small miracle, we come to an agreement with the invaders and find a way to live alongside them? That’s exactly what Cory Finley‘s Landscape With Invisible Hand aims to find out, albeit to mixed results.
Taking place a few years after a hyper-intelligent alien race known as the Vuvv took over planet Earth, Landscape With Invisible Hand subverts expectations by informing us that they did so through soft economic power rather than brute force, bringing wondrous technology to Earth that only the wealthiest could afford. This technology rendered most jobs obsolete (neurosurgeons now work as highly-paid valets for the Vuvv, for example), leaving the rest of humanity to scrape together money in the tourism industry.
Our point of entry for this new reality is Adam (Asante Blackk, When They See Us), a teenage artist living with his mother Beth (Tiffany Haddish, who also serves as executive producer) and sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie). Adam makes a connection with his poverty-stricken classmate Chloe (Kylie Rogers, Yellowstone), who has been living in her family’s car under an overpass. After inviting her and her family to live in his family’s basement, Adam and Chloe begin livestreaming their courtship for the amusement of the coffee-table sized Vuvv, who find human love exotic and interesting and thus pay to view the livestream. However, when Adam and Chloe’s scheme goes sideways, Adam and his mother have to find their way out of an increasingly nightmarish alien bureaucracy.
If that sounds like a lot of information, well, it is. Based on M.T. Anderson’s novella of the same name, Landscape With Invisible Hand is essentially divided into chapters marked by various works of Adam’s art (courtesy of Atlanta-based artist William Downs). Unfortunately, Finley tries to cram far too much into Landscape‘s brief 94-minute runtime. The worldbuilding is effective, even for viewers unfamiliar with the source material, but the plot can be a bit scattershot, with the film struggling to find a central point of focus. Yes, the overall theme of human resilience is prevalent throughout, and yes, Adam is our main character, but there’s a lot of things to unpack in a film with too little real estate. Plot points in the first act resolve in order to make way for new ones, but Finley insists on keeping certain characters around that now feel superfluous to the plot. One could argue that these characters are necessary to the central themes, but while this may work on the page, it doesn’t always work on film.
Asante Blackk and Kylie Rogers in Landscape With Invisible Hand, Courtesy of MGM
The Vuvv themselves are a sight to behold. Cold, logical and incapable of love (love is a singularly human emotion, after all), the Vuvv are brought to life via CGI courtesy of Erik-Jan de Boer (Okja). They communicate by rubbing their flippers together, using voice boxes to translate on their behalf. It’s a unique design that absolutely deserves kudos, even if the CGI isn’t particularly convincing. Still, it’s a much more technically ambitious production than Finley’s prior feature effort Thoroughbreds, so that deserves a special mention.
Melancholy and bleak in tone, one can admire Landscape for not going the traditional Hollywood route with its extraterrestrial creatures. Try as our characters might, there is no journey of emotional discovery for the Vuvv. There is no light at the end of the tunnel in the hope for a better world. Our characters (and us by proxy) are stuck here and have to make the best of it. As for the performances, Blackk carries the emotional brunt of the film, delivering a quietly moving performance that elevates the picture. Haddish, uncharacteristically playing a more dramatic role, gives one of her best performances to date as a mother doing anything she can to help her family in the face of absolute hopelessness.
Landscape With Invisible Hand paints a portrait of a fascinating world that could have done with a longer runtime to help flesh out some of its ideas. The micro-level approach is fine, but there’s just too much here to fully absorb. Still, performances are strong and aid a so-so screenplay, making it difficult not to be captivated by this strangely engrossing new status quo.
Landscape With Invisible Hand had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by MGM later this year.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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