Pet Shop Days (2023) by Olmo Schnabel

Alejandro — impulsive, magnetically charismatic — flees his Mexican cartel family after nearly killing his mother and lands in New York. He finds Jack, a sheltered pet shop worker with his own parental wreckage. Their collision sends both of them spiralling through the city’s underground until Alejandro’s past catches up with them both.

Shot in gloriously scuzzy 16mm by cinematographer Hunter Zimny, Pet Shop Days appeals to hip arthouse crowds who relish prickly characters and messy narratives richer in atmosphere than tight plotting. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section in 2023, the film spent two years on the festival circuit before Utopia released it in the US in March 2025 — a slow-burn distribution arc that built organic anticipation among its core audience. Executive producers including Martin Scorsese and Michel Franco give it serious industry credibility. Hunter Zimny shoots the film with a tactile celluloid quality that makes Pet Shop Days feel like an ’80s picture — a deliberately anachronistic aesthetic that is the film’s most striking artistic statement.

Elements Driving the Trend: Olmo Schnabel draws inspiration from gritty New York films of the 1970s, painting an impressionistic landscape where the city is a den of dark pleasures — the film can be hypnotic in its non-judgemental view of these damaged individuals. The Scorsese executive producer credit — won by Schnabel simply sending him the film — signals genuine artistic ambition at the heart of the project. The multilingual cast — Yazbek Bernal, Verdú, Seigner, Dafoe — gives the film an unusual cosmopolitan texture for a downtown New York story.

Virality: The film’s unconventional premise, Venice pedigree, and distinctive 16mm aesthetic drove sustained organic interest among LGBTQ+ film communities and Letterboxd discovery culture. The nepo-baby conversation generated mainstream visibility that its limited release otherwise would not have achieved.

Critics Reception: Variety praised the film’s visceral feel and Schnabel’s sensitivity to his characters, noting enough creativity to indicate a filmmaker already capable of occupying the spotlight on his own. Screen Daily called it hypnotic in its non-judgemental portrait. The Film Stage described it as a nobly scathing piece of work with admirable formal confidence.

Awards and Recognitions: 1 win and 5 nominations total. World premiere Venice Film Festival Horizons Extra, September 3, 2023. US release via Utopia, March 15, 2025.

Pet Shop Days arrives as a genuinely uncommon object in contemporary arthouse cinema — a queer downtown New York film with real atmosphere, real danger, and a leading performance of memorable intensity. For the industry, Schnabel’s debut signals a filmmaker worth tracking even as it demonstrates the particular challenges of debut features that prioritise mood and character over conventional plotting.

Pet Shop Days belongs to a tradition of queer New York films — from Cruising to Mysterious Skin — that use male-male desire as a lens for examining self-destruction, class, and the city’s capacity to transform its inhabitants. The 16mm aesthetic, the non-judgmental camera, and the refusal of an easy resolution place it squarely within a Cassavetes-inflected tradition of letting characters exist on their own terms. Schnabel’s approach to his characters is visceral in a way that few films achieve — capturing the energy of young adults afforded every opportunity who choose the harder, darker path instead. The film treats its subject with the seriousness and formal conviction of a director who trusts his audience to sit inside discomfort.

Trend Drivers: A New Generation Reclaims the Downtown NYC Aesthetic In a contemporary absence of true New York stories told by filmmakers with more moxie than money, Schnabel distinguishes himself with a debut that feels tactile, real, and suitably off-putting. The 16mm format is not nostalgia but necessity — the correct aesthetic for a film about characters living without safety nets. The Scorsese connection places it in a direct lineage with the moral ambiguity of Mean Streets. The Latin American art cinema thread — Yazbek Bernal, the Mexican cartel backstory, Maribel Verdú — gives the film genuine cross-cultural texture.

What Is Influencing Trend: The post-Moonlight expansion of queer cinema into genre-adjacent territory — crime, thriller, body horror — has created space for films that use LGBTQ+ desire without centring identity politics. The downtown New York film is experiencing a revival through filmmakers committed to formal specificity over streaming-ready production values. The toxic romance as dramatic engine — Saltburn, Bones and All — is one of the most commercially resonant modes in contemporary arthouse cinema.

Macro Trends Influencing: Festival culture’s appetite for challenging, formally unconventional debuts remains strong. Venice’s Horizons section continues to be one of the most reliable launchpads for transgressive debut features. The queer film festival circuit has created a reliable pipeline for LGBTQ+ content that mainstream platforms won’t acquire — and that finds its audience through exactly the slow-burn discovery arc Pet Shop Days has followed.

Consumer Trends Influencing: The LGBTQ+ arthouse audience is one of the most Letterboxd-engaged demographics, and the film’s passionate divided reception drives exactly the kind of debate that generates discovery. Audiences drawn to Bones and All, Call Me By Your Name, and Saltburn’s mode of beautiful moral ambiguity will find Pet Shop Days operating in familiar and rewarding territory. The 16mm aesthetic resonates strongly with younger viewers who respond to analogue filmmaking as an artistic statement.

Audience Analysis: Arthouse LGBTQ+ Cinema Fans, Downtown Indie Film Devotees, and the Saltburn Crowd The core audience is 20–40 — queer-literate arthouse viewers who follow festival circuit cinema and respond to films that treat desire as dangerous rather than affirming. Yazbek Bernal exudes the same carnal appeal as his half-brother Gael García Bernal — playing Alejandro as a sexual carnivore, monstrous but compelling enough to explain why Jack continues to follow him. The Willem Dafoe and Emmanuelle Seigner casting draws established arthouse audiences into a film that might otherwise circulate only within the queer festival circuit.

Pet Shop Days works for viewers willing to accept that a film can prioritise atmosphere and character over resolution — that the 16mm texture, the New York evocation, and a central performance of rare intensity can sustain an entire film. That willingness is increasingly the mark of the arthouse audience the film was built for.

Olmo Schnabel delivers a debut that announces a real cinematic sensibility — a filmmaker who already knows how to use a camera, how to inhabit a city, and how to draw a performance of dangerous magnetism from his lead. The 16mm photography is extraordinary, the New York evocation is precise, and Yazbek Bernal’s Alejandro is one of the most compelling screen presences in recent arthouse cinema. There’s enough swagger behind the camera to indicate the millennial filmmaker has his own irreverent point of view that should separate him from his father’s legacy as he moves forward.

Audience Relevance: For Viewers Who Prefer Their Queer Cinema Without a Safety Net Pet Shop Days refuses the consolations of conventional queer cinema — no easy self-discovery, no redemption arc — and offers instead a portrait of desire as mutual transformation, however destructive. That refusal is its most honest and most distinctive quality.

The audience that will love this film is the one that agrees with its premise: that some relationships are simply catastrophic, and cinema’s job is to watch them unfold without flinching.

What Is the Message: Some People Are Drawn to Each Other Precisely Because They Will Change Each Other Irreversibly Alejandro and Jack have little in common except damaged fathers and the willingness to follow each other into places neither would go alone. The city enables and accelerates everything between them.

The New York underworld they inhabit is not a backdrop but a force — a city that rewards the reckless and transforms the hesitant, exactly as these two men do to each other.

Relevance to Audience: A Downtown New York Film That Earns Every Frame of Its Atmosphere The 16mm cinematography gives Pet Shop Days the feel of a 1970s New York film — neon-lit strip clubs, underground dens, and a city that feels genuinely alive rather than decoratively gritty. For viewers who respond to location as character, the film delivers something few contemporary New York films attempt.

The atmosphere is the film’s most consistent pleasure — immersive, textural, and entirely convincing in its evocation of a city that has always devoured its most reckless inhabitants.

Social Relevance: Class, Queerness, and the Privilege of Choosing the Hard Way Both Alejandro and Jack have options — their spiral is a choice enabled by privilege — and the film’s most interesting observation is that wealth provides the freedom to make the most destructive decisions available. The cartel backstory frames Alejandro’s volatility as inherited rather than innate.

That class dimension gives the film a social resonance that extends beyond its LGBTQ+ subject matter and connects it to a broader story about what affluence and absence of consequence produce in young men.

Performance: Yazbek Bernal Is the Film’s Greatest Achievement Bernal utilises Alejandro’s mercurial brattiness to showcase the push-pull influence of growing up under Castro’s tight-fisted control — and the performance communicates how youthful love forces individuals to ignore red flags. It is the kind of debut lead performance that announces a significant screen presence.

Willem Dafoe and Emmanuelle Seigner bring their customary intelligence and authority to Jack’s dysfunctional parents, grounding the film’s wilder moments in recognisable domestic reality.

Legacy: A Debut That Points Confidently Toward Something More Significant to Come Pet Shop Days will be remembered as the film that announced Olmo Schnabel as a director with a genuine point of view and the formal confidence to pursue it — backed by Scorsese, premiered at Venice, and discovered slowly by exactly the audience it deserved.

The film Schnabel makes next — with the experience of this one behind him — will be the one that defines him. This is the beginning of something worth watching.

Success: Venice Premiere, Festival Circuit, Growing Cult Discovery 1 win and 5 nominations. Venice Horizons Extra premiere September 3, 2023. US release Utopia March 15, 2025. French release October 22, 2025. IMDb 5.3 from early viewers — a score that underrepresents the passionate response from the specific audience the film was built for.

The film’s slow-burn discovery arc is its own kind of success: a genuinely uncommon cinematic object finding its way to the viewers who will value it most.

Pet Shop Days is not the easiest film to love — but for the viewer it was made for, it is exactly the film they needed.

• Movie themes: Toxic desire, class-enabled self-destruction, inherited violence, and New York as a space where damaged people find each other and discover the limits of who they are. A queer romance without easy answers.

• Movie director: Bold debut with genuine cinematic vision. Olmo Schnabel — backed by Scorsese, premiered at Venice — delivers a 16mm downtown New York film of real atmospheric intensity, announcing a filmmaker whose best work is clearly ahead of him.

• Top casting: Yazbek Bernal commands every frame. Dario Yazbek Bernal delivers a genuinely magnetic, dangerous performance as Alejandro — one of arthouse cinema’s most compelling recent debut lead performances. Willem Dafoe and Emmanuelle Seigner bring authority and intelligence to their supporting roles.

• Awards and recognition: 1 win and 5 nominations. Venice Film Festival Horizons Extra, September 2023. US release Utopia March 15, 2025. French release October 22, 2025.

• Why to watch: A 16mm downtown New York film with extraordinary atmosphere, a dangerous lead performance, and executive producers including Martin Scorsese — a genuinely uncommon cinematic object that rewards the specific viewer it was made for.

• Key success factors: The 16mm aesthetic, Yazbek Bernal’s performance, and the Venice/Scorsese pedigree give the film a cultural standing that positions it as a cult discovery — the kind of film that builds its audience slowly and keeps them permanently.

• Where to watch: Available via Utopia in the US. French theatrical release October 2025. Streaming availability expanding.