Review: 'Landscape With Invisible Hand,' a social satire hidden in an alien-invasion comedy, has more ideas than it can handle

Writer-director Cory Finley’s satire “Landscape With Invisible Hand” is so overflowing with ideas — about class and race divisions, the commodification of emotion, and the soft fascism we bring on ourselves through capitalism — that it doesn’t entirely know what to do with all of them.

It’s 2036, a few years after a race of aliens, the Vuvv, have arrived on Earth. It was an invasion, not by force but by generosity — the Vuvv, who one character describes as “gooey coffee tables,” gave humans their advanced technology, making most human jobs obsolete. The rich have moved up to the Vuvv’s floating vessels, while the rest of the humans are unemployed or underemployed, trying to live on the scraps and junk dropped on us from above.

Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, formerly of “This Is Us”) is a 17-year-old aspiring artist, living in a house with his mom, Beth (Tiffany Haddish), an unemployed lawyer, and little sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie), who’s growing vegetables in what used to be their pool. At least the Campbells have a house, because others don’t. The new girl in school, Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers), lives in the family car with her dad (Josh Hamilton) and brooding older brother Hunter (Michael Gandolfini).

Adam connects with Chloe, and soon invites the Marshes to live in their basement, as a teen romance starts to blossom. As love grows, Chloe suggests she and Adam start a livestream of their romance to the Vuvv — because they don’t have “love,” and are fascinated enough by the concept that they’ll pay money to watch humans experience it.

The livestreaming goes well for awhile, and brings money into both households. But as first love fades, the Vuvv notice the difference — and threaten to sue Chloe and Adam for a broadcast they consider “deceitful.” The Campbell and Marsh families, whose relations were already strained, splinter even further when they each try to find a solution to keep the Vuvv from suing them into generations of debt.

Finley (“Thoroughbreds”), in adapting M.T. Anderson’s novel, finds rich veins of social commentary to explore, particularly about the ways humans will divide themselves by class, and how the folks on the bottom will be as resentful of the folks just above them as toward the people at the top. There are also some intriguing threads about how everything that makes us human — our art, our emotions, our relationships — are available for someone to slap a price tag on them.

If only Finley’s command of the visual side of the material — like the comical way the Vuvv communicate by rubbing their paddle-like flippers — was matched by the emotional control. That remains elusive, even with evocative performances by Blackk, Rogers and particularly Haddish, showing the lengths a strong woman will go (and not go) for her family’s well-being.

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‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 18, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Century 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated R for language and brief violent content. Running time: 105 minutes.