Darren Aronofsky has always filmed obsession like a sickness — an infection of the mind that spreads until there’s nothing left but ruin. In "Caught Stealing," that same fever burns through comedy instead of despair. It’s a film built on pure escalation — a comedy of errors disguised as a crime thriller, where bad luck metastasises into destiny, and one man’s ordinary life collapses under the absurd weight of consequence.
Austin Butler plays Hank, a washed-up ballplayer turned reluctant barman, whose life unravels after he agrees to watch his neighbour’s cat. What follows isn’t a descent so much as a freefall — a relentless chain of beatings, betrayals, and coincidences that feel both random and inevitable. Aronofsky directs the chaos with the precision of a sadist, but this time there’s a glimmer of amusement behind the cruelty. It’s as though he’s laughing with the gods while they rearrange the pieces of fate.
The film moves with the rhythm of panic — breathless cuts, lurid light, a sense that every frame is on the verge of collapse. The 1990s New York setting feels less like a place than a state of decay: sweat-stained bars, flickering street lamps, and the endless hum of a city that devours the unlucky. It’s Aronofsky at his most kinetic, but also his most playful. The filmmaking here isn’t austere or punishing — it’s alive, grimy, gleefully cruel.
Butler gives the film its tragic pulse. His Hank isn’t a hero or even a survivor — he’s collateral damage in a story that keeps inventing new ways to destroy him. There’s an almost spiritual exhaustion in his performance, as though the only thing left to do is endure the next disaster with grim resignation. Around him orbit a cast of grotesques — thugs, schemers, and opportunists who all seem to exist for the pleasure of watching him bleed.Butler gives the film its tragic pulse, but the chaos around him is what sharpens it.
Matt Smith is superb as Russ, the erratic neighbour whose cat ignites the chain reaction — a man so casually reckless he feels like fate wearing a smirk. Bad Bunny, as a violent opportunist caught between self-interest and spectacle, injects the film with swagger and volatility. Then there are the two Hasidic hitmen — equal parts menace and absurdity — who move through the story like grim punchlines to an unfunny joke.
Each encounter pushes Hank further from the man he was and closer to the animal he’s forced to become. By the time he finally stops running and decides to play them at their own game, the tone shifts. The hunted becomes the strategist. It’s not redemption — Aronofsky doesn’t deal in that — but reclamation. For once, Hank’s suffering stops being punishment and starts becoming purpose.
For me, what makes "Caught Stealing" so fascinating is that it feels like Aronofsky finally embracing the chaos he’s spent decades trying to control. The precision of Black Swan, the agony of The Whale, the mania of Requiem — all that discipline explodes here into something anarchic, filthy, and weirdly joyful. This is the director loosening his grip, and somehow creating something equally sharp because of it.
The film is far from tidy. It lurches between brutality and absurdity, sincerity and parody, tragedy and farce — but that volatility becomes its truth. Aronofsky understands that life rarely collapses neatly; it implodes in fragments, in laughter, in accidents. It’s an ode to bad timing and cosmic cruelty, but it’s also exhilarating — a reminder that disaster can be just as thrilling as redemption.
It’s been years since Aronofsky made something this alive. "Caught Stealing" is pure combustion: violent, absurd, deeply cinematic, and more entertaining than he has any right to be. The suffering is still there — he wouldn’t be Aronofsky without it — but here, it dances.
8/10
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