105 min | R | August 18, 2023 | MGM
Aliens land, automate the economy, and leave teenagers selling their love lives as content. Adam and Chloe broadcast their courtship to paying alien subscribers because rent is due. The premise is the bleakest joke about capitalism anyone made this year.
Adam Campbell is a teenage artist living in a near future where aliens called the Vuvv have arrived and gutted the human economy. The Vuvv hover above the suburbs in floating mansions and sell technology that makes most human labor worthless. Adam and his girlfriend Chloe figure out how to make money by broadcasting their courtship to alien subscribers who pay to watch human romance. Cory Finley builds a science fiction satire about what happens when an outside force decides your feelings have market value and your survival depends on faking them. The real subject is the way capitalism turns intimacy into product and then collapses the price the moment the novelty wears off.
Asante Blackk plays Adam with a watchfulness that holds the film together. He paints in private and performs affection in public, and Blackk lets you see the cost of the second job. Kylie Rogers plays Chloe with a hustle that hardens as the rent comes due. Their romance curdles in real time once the Vuvv start docking their pay for inauthentic emotion. Tiffany Haddish plays Adam’s mother Beth and drops the comic register entirely, playing a laid-off professional who interviews to become a live-in human curiosity for an alien household. Josh Hamilton and Michael Gandolfini fill the Marsh family with the specific desperation of people who used to be middle class.
Finley writes and directs, and he stages the alien occupation through absence rather than spectacle. The Vuvv communicate by rubbing their flipper-like hands together, and the sound design renders their speech as a wet scraping that never stops being unpleasant. The production design keeps the human houses cramped and lit by screens while the alien wealth floats overhead as clean geometric shapes. Finley shoots the courtship broadcasts in a flattened, sitcom-bright style that exposes how performance and surveillance share a frame. The tonal control from his earlier work survives the jump to genre, even when the script reaches for more ideas than it can land.
The film works best as a portrait of an economy where the rules change without warning and the people at the bottom absorb every shock. Adam’s art is the one thing the Vuvv cannot price, and the film treats that as both his salvation and a kind of trap. Finley keeps stacking premises faster than he resolves them, and the back half strains under the load. The ambition is the point and also the limit. It reaches for satire, family drama, and first-contact allegory at once, and it grabs enough of each to leave a mark.