‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’ Trailer: Asante Blackk Fakes Love for Views

Fake love is broadcasting over the airwaves in the trailer for Landscape With Invisible Hand. Coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film stars Asante Blackk and Kylie Rogers as young couple Adam Costello and Chloe Marsh who hatch a plan to earn money through their supposedly real relationship by broadcasting it out to their alien overlords. As the trailer shows, however, it doesn’t exactly go as planned, and they need to find a way out for themselves and their families as they face serious consequences.

Landscape With Invisible Hand is based on the book of the same name by M.T. Anderson and is set in a dystopian sci-fi reality where Earth is overseen by an alien bureaucracy. As alien technology interferes with Earth, most of its citizens are left impoverished and without work, but there is a way to make money. These aliens love the culture and relationships between humans and nothing satisfies them like the true love between a couple. Since romantic relationships don’t exist in the aliens’ culture, they find it all the more fascinating to watch dates, kisses, and more unfold, paying top dollar for live streams of love in action. In order to support their families, Adam and Chloe pretend to be a couple in order to earn cash through their alien viewers.

The trailer starts off like any good romance film – Adam and Chloe meet organically in a painting class, forming an instant connection through their love of art. All seems well as they grow closer with Adam even painting a portrait of Chloe supposedly out of love. As soon as they go in to kiss, however, they turn the cameras on before the good part happens. They keep the cameras rolling through every major moment in their relationship – every kiss, every romantic film, every school dance, and every family dinner. Despite not feeling love themselves, these aliens understand human love down to a science and are quickly able to deduce that Adam and Chloe don’t actually feel that way about each other anymore. They’ve fallen out of love with each other at the end of the honeymoon phase and the cost of such deception is enough to land their families in debt for six generations. As they work to appease their overlords, Adam and Chloe try to prove they can get that love back and, in the process, show how much humanity has overcome in the aliens’ presence.

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Who Is Behind Landscape With Invisible Hand

Adapting Landscape With Invisible Hand is Cory Finley whose previous filmography includes the Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy-led Thoroughbreds and Bad Education starring Hugh Jackman. Finley also directed a pair of episodes from Apple’s starry WeWork series WeCrashed. Out of a stacked Sundance lineup this year including early 2023 favorite Past Lives, his latest feature earned solid reviews including a B- from Collider’s own Ross Bonaime who praised it for its wild story that works despite its flaws. Speaking to Collider’s own Steve Weintraub back when the film debuted at Sundance, Finley emphasized how the film manages to mix big budget feel and intimacy with Okja VFX supervisor Erik De Boer helping capture the stellar effects:

“Yeah, it’s a great question because it’s not a cheap, tiny movie. It certainly has scope and scale, but also one of the things that really drew me to this story – and it’s based on a wonderful book by M.T. Anderson – is that it’s also super intimate. So it has sort of a big budget shell and a moving, smaller-movie heart, I suppose. Hopefully, the best of both worlds.”

The rest of the team is filled to the brim with stars including Tiffany Haddish as Blackk and Rogers’s co-star. She’s also an executive producer alongside Anderson, Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, David Kern, and Megan Ellison. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner serve as producers.

Landscape With Invisible Hand premieres in theaters on August 18. Check out the trailer below: