You know it's Aronofsky when the cat might be the most traumatized character.
Sony Pictures has just released a new “Inside Look” featurette for Caught Stealing, Darren Aronofsky's upcoming crime comedy set in the beautifully grimy underbelly of 1990s New York. The film hits theaters August 29, 2025, and based on this fresh behind-the-scenes promo, it looks like the kind of gonzo genre detour most directors only dare when they've already made Black Swan, The Wrestler, and a biblical disaster epic with rock monsters.
This isn't the Aronofsky of elegiac suffering and whispered self-destruction. This is the guy smirking behind the camera while Austin Butler dodges Russian mobsters, deranged leather-clad brothers, and a Samoan hitman—all because of a damn cat.
“He was just supposed to watch the cat.”
That's the pitch. And as it turns out, it's the perfect launchpad for an escalating spiral of violence, absurdity, and bad decisions. Based on Charlie Huston's 2004 pulp novel of the same name, Caught Stealing follows Hank Thompson (Butler)—a washed-up former high school baseball prodigy, now tending bar and drinking his regrets, who agrees to cat-sit for his punk neighbor (Russ, played by a still-undisclosed actor). The cat, Bud, comes with a cage. And at the bottom of that cage? A key. And the key? Everyone wants it.
In the new featurette, Butler and Aronofsky talk shop over moody set footage and bursts of street-level action. “It's like a paranoid odyssey,” Butler says, looking genuinely shell-shocked. “Hank has no idea what's happening or why, and neither do we—but that's what makes it fun.”
The cast is as eclectic as the city it's set in: Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Carol Kane, Griffin Dunne, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Benito A Martínez Ocasio (yes, that Bad Bunny). If this feels like a mix between After Hours and Snatch, you're not far off. But make no mistake—Aronofsky isn't mimicking; he's remixing with full control.
The City Is a Character, and It's in a Mood
Filmed with a scuzzy, handheld aesthetic that feels closer to Requiem for a Dream than The Whale, the featurette teases a New York drenched in yellowed neon, cigarette haze, and the kind of filth you can't fake. The 90s setting isn't just a backdrop—it's a psychological condition. Payphones. Graffiti-tagged alleys. NYPD in windbreakers. No digital surveillance, just paranoia, rot, and bad choices.
And Aronofsky leans in. There's an almost perverse glee in how chaos multiplies. The cat, the key, the escalating violence—it's all too much, and that's the point. “Hank's life is falling apart, and we wanted the world around him to feel like it's closing in,” Aronofsky says. “It's funny, but it's also brutal.”
Featurette as Controlled Tease
Sony's “Inside Look” drops just as the marketing campaign is pivoting from cryptic to chaotic. The featurette doesn't give away major plot beats, but it does highlight the tonal tightrope: absurdity laced with anxiety, violence undercut by deadpan humor, and a central performance that looks to reframe Butler's post-Elvis career.
This isn't the golden-boy glamour role he might've been expected to chase. Butler plays Hank with a half-lidded, shell-shocked passivity that slowly curdles into frantic survival. He's confused. He's drunk. He's bleeding. He's trying to find out why the city suddenly wants him dead. And it all started with a meow.
Aronofsky, Off-Leash
For a director often associated with existential despair, Caught Stealing is something else entirely: kinetic, profane, and intentionally messy. That doesn't mean it's light. There's still suffering—this time just dressed in leather and carrying a lead pipe. It's the kind of genre film a prestige auteur makes when he wants to remember what movies can do when they stop pretending to be important.
The screenplay is adapted by Charlie Huston himself, keeping the grit intact. The producers—Jeremy Dawson, Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, and Aronofsky—know exactly what they're packaging: a blood-soaked, laugh-out-loud street odyssey where everyone's chasing something they don't understand.
Will it land? Maybe. The concept alone risks tonal whiplash, and audiences might not know what to do with it. But if you're in the mood for something unpredictable, grimy, and viciously funny, Caught Stealing could scratch that itch left by too many safe bets this summer.
