When a neighbor asks him to cat-sit for a few days, he soon finds himself pursued by dangerous gangsters. He must survive a chaotic web of threats long enough to uncover why they’re after him. A film by Darren Aronofsky, starring Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Action Bronson, George Abud, Nikita Kukushkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Brill, Tenoch Huerta, and Carol Kane.
CAUGHT STEALING
Darren Aronofsky
(2025)
It’s 4 am in the Lower East Side, NYC, 1998. Bartender Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) closes up Paul’s Bar as his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) stops by, and they walk back to his nearby apartment.
They run into Hank’s neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) kneeling outside Hank’s apartment. Russ asks Hank to cat-sit for him, but Hank refuses, saying he’s not good at taking care of things. He changes his mind when Russ lightly taps him on the forehead and tells him to stop being selfish. Russ explains his father had a stroke and he needs to get back to London.
The next day, as Hank is about to enter Russ’s apartment to find food for Bud, he encounters two strangers dressed in black: Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov). When Aleksei asks if Russ is home, Hank says he isn’t, but Pavel accuses him of lying. When Pavel tries to push past him into the apartment, Hank blocks his way. Pavel and Aleksei begin beating Hank viciously until his neighbor Duane (George Abud) intervenes, threatening to call the police. They flee, and Hank passes out.
While unconscious, Hank experiences a recurring nightmare of the day he drove drunk and crashed his car. The accident killed his friend Dale (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and destroyed his knee, ending his dream of playing major league baseball. When Hank wakes up in the hospital, Yvonne tells him doctors had to remove his ruptured kidney to save his life and that he’s been unconscious for two days. Hank borrows Yvonne’s phone to call his mom in California. They talk daily about their favorite team, the San Francisco Giants. He tells her he’s been sick with food poisoning.
Yvonne hands Hank a card, explaining that a cop came by and left it for him. She didn’t know what to tell the officer since she wasn’t there when it happened. Hank shares that some thugs came looking for Russ and beat the shit out of him instead. Yvonne agrees to help him check out of the hospital after Hank confides he can’t stay any longer because he can’t afford the bill. In the cab back to his apartment, Yvonne warns Hank he can’t drink anymore since he only has one kidney left to process toxins.
The next day, Hank returns from doing laundry and spots one of the thugs, Aleksei, getting pizza from the shop across the street. Frightened, he quickly slips inside. As he climbs the stairs, he hears a loud thud coming from upstairs. Hank carefully peeks around the corner and sees two men trying to force open Russ’s apartment door. He recognizes Pavel, but the other man is new. Pavel calls the new man Oleg (Oleg Prudius).
Not wanting more trouble, Hank rushes to the rooftop and takes the fire escape down to his room, only to discover his window is locked from the inside. When he hears noises from Russ’s apartment next door, he peers through the window and watches them tear the place apart, searching frantically for something. After getting back into his apartment, Hank pulls out Detective Elise Roman’s card and calls her.
Later, Detective Elise Roman (Regina King) and Officer Runz (Gregg Bello) arrive at Hank’s apartment. After Hank describes the men he saw, who he thinks are Ukrainian, Roman explains they’re actually Russian mafia. She reveals that Russ Miner is a person of interest in a narcotics investigation.
Roman then shows Hank a photo of Hasidic Drucker brothers: Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio). She asks if he’s been in contact with them. Hank insists he doesn’t know them. Before leaving, Roman warns him that those two are real monsters, and if he sees them, he should call her immediately.
Moments later, Hank stumbles upon a fake poo toy hidden in Bud’s litter box with a key inside. Suddenly, he hears noise from the hallway. He peeks through the peephole and sees two Hasidic men matching the photo Roman showed him breaking into Russ’s apartment. Realizing they and the Russians are after the key he just found, Hank calls Roman, but her line is busy. He leaves a message.
Hank comes up with a plan. He visits the bar and asks his boss Paul (Griffin Dunne) to hold onto the key for him, but ends up getting drunk when Paul and the other patrons insist on toasting the Giants. By the time Yvonne stops by to take him home, Hank is wasted. He hurts her feelings by lamenting how he was once destined for greatness and now has nothing. Yvonne leaves in a cab while Hank stumbles back to his apartment alone.
The next day, Hank wakes up to find Pavel and Aleksei in his apartment along with a man who introduces himself as Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio). Colorado threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t hand over what Russ gave him. Hank explains he didn’t get anything from Russ, but he did find a key hidden in a fake poop toy in the litter box. Pavel empties the litter box and picks up the fake poop, but finds nothing inside. Furious, Colorado accuses Hank of lying and has Pavel and Aleksei torture him. Hank insists he got drunk and blacked out, so he can’t remember what happened to the key.
While torturing Hank, they’re interrupted by Duane repeatedly knocking on the door and complaining about the noise. Colorado orders Hank to tell Duane to fuck off. Hank complies, but Duane won’t leave. Losing patience, Pavel jerks open the door and screams at Duane to fuck off. Colorado and the Russians have no choice but to leave since they have been seen. Before heading out, Colorado hands Hank his number and tells him to call when he finds the key. He warns Hank they know he talked to the police, and if he contacts the police again, they’ll kill everyone he cares about.
Directed by American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and written by Charlie Huston, CAUGHT STEALING is a crime thriller based on Huston’s 2004 novel of the same name.
While the cast delivers believable performances, particularly Austin Butler and Matt Smith, the pacing is incredibly slow. Not much happens in the first 44 minutes. The narrative unfolds like a stereotypical crime story about a man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I hate flashback sequences, especially when they don’t serve the narrative and are deliberately fragmented to conceal easily predictable information. In this case, the flashbacks eventually reveal that Hank Thompson’s friend Dale was killed in a car accident while Hank sustained a career-ending knee injury that destroyed his dream of becoming a major league baseball player.
Austin Butler’s character Hank Thompson keeps making one wrong decision after another, but the film fails to convince me that his poor choices stem from his attempt to run away from the past or even his present circumstances. He does a lot of running in this film at full sprint, despite formerly having a severe knee injury and recently being hospitalized to have a kidney removed after being brutally beaten.
Zoë Kravitz plays Yvonne, Hank’s love interest who is quickly murdered and discarded. While her death creates tension and motivates Hank’s quest for justice and revenge, I wish Kravitz had more screentime to establish Yvonne’s significance in Hank’s life. She appears and disappears too abruptly, leaving me wanting to know more about her character.
There’s absolutely nothing new in this crime thriller. The story is straightforward with a few predictable twists. The film is only 104 minutes long but feels like 150 minutes. However, I was surprised to finally see Laura Dern, who plays Hank’s mom and taught him baseball. Throughout the entire film, we only hear her voice on the phone and never see her face, so her appearance at the end of the movie was unexpected.
One scene that really bothered me is when Paul thinks he can overpower two armed men and a police officer with his shotgun (and one of them has an Uzi). It makes no sense at all. It would be convincing if Paul died in the first confrontation and Hank locked himself in the strongroom, rather than having Paul open the door and get himself killed.
And Hank basically kills Russ when he hits him in the head with a baseball bat and doesn’t rush him to the hospital for concussion treatment, which leads to a traumatic brain injury and internal damage that eventually kills Russ. I know this comes from the novel set in 2000, when concussion awareness wasn’t as widespread as today, but I expected Russ to survive long enough to be the fall guy. Once Russ is dead, the film feels underwhelming. It struggles to be either a straight crime comedy since it’s never funny enough, or a black comedy since it never gets dark enough.
CAUGHT STEALING was theatrically released in the United States on 29 August 2025.
