Caught Stealing (2025)

Darren Aronofsky has done something peculiar with Caught Stealing. After years of putting his protagonists through psychological meat grinders, he’s made a film about a bloke who just wanted to feed someone’s cat. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, ex-baseball hopeful turned bartender, who agrees to mind a neighbour’s feline and promptly finds himself dodging bullets across Manhattan. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. That’s rather the point, I suspect.

Butler handles the role with surprising dexterity. He’s believable as both the ordinary guy caught in extraordinary circumstances and the athlete whose muscle memory kicks in when survival depends on it. There’s something compelling about watching someone navigate chaos not through tactical brilliance but through sheer bewildered determination. His performance suggests that heroism might just be confusion with better reflexes.

The film bounces between genres like a pinball, ricocheting from dark comedy to genuine menace and back again. Sometimes this works brilliantly. Other times it feels like Aronofsky couldn’t quite decide what movie he was making. The 1990s New York setting provides gorgeous texture, all neon grit and urban decay, but the tonal whiplash occasionally leaves you wondering if you’ve missed a memo about what you’re supposed to be feeling.

Regina King and Zoë Kravitz anchor the supporting cast with the kind of grounded performances that prevent the whole enterprise from floating away entirely. They understand the assignment, even when the assignment keeps changing.

By the final act, the scattered pieces snap together with satisfying precision. The film works, in my view, precisely because it refuses to take its own premise too seriously. Sometimes the most honest way to examine how ordinary people respond to extraordinary pressure is through the lens of beautiful absurdity.

Caught Stealing is flawed but fascinating. It’s Aronofsky having fun, and that counts for something.