Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s Pet Shop Days essay contains spoilers. Olmo Schnabel’s 2024 film features Dario Yazbek Bernal, Jack Irv and Emmanuelle Seigner. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

You can weigh the impact of an indie sensation by the number of stylistic imitators which emerge in the immediate years following its release. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) led to a wave of inferior, dialogue-driven and off-beat crime capers, while Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004) was responsible for even more insufferable tales of sad boy melancholy. And now, the collective influences of Sean Baker and the Safdie Brothers can be felt in a new wave of scuzzy sagas. On the surface, Pet Shop Days appears to be harking back to an earlier wave of queer indie cinema — like the provocative irreverence of Gregg Araki’s young-men-on-the-road 90s productions — but its adjacence to a world of sex work and organized crime suggests that its reference points are far more recent, not to mention evoked in a purely superficial manner.

The directorial debut of Olmo Schnabel (the son of American painter/filmmaker and Jean-Michel Basquiat associate Julian Schnabel) at times feels like a conscious effort to shake off the prestige associations of his father, borrowing one of his recent stars (Willem Dafoe) but none of the tastefulness of his best-known biopic works. As a result, Pet Shop Days feels like forced provocation, a relentless and tiresome assault on viewers who will remain unprovoked and oddly bored despite the film’s consistent aspirations to ruffle feathers with each scene. We’re in a cultural moment with a wider variety of queer stories, and yet so few aim to emulate the incendiary effects of work from decades earlier. The most damning thing about Pet Shop Days is that, even in an LGBTQ cinema landscape starved of controversy, Schnabel’s coming-of-age attack on basic human decency is more likely to elicit yawns than gasps.

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Opening in Mexico, Schnabel sets the ground running with the introduction of Alejandro (Darío Yazbek Bernal, younger brother of actor Gael Garcia Bernal) curled up in bed, enjoying a flirtation with an older woman who is revealed to be his mother. Less than 10 minutes later, after a familial tragedy, the antihero embarks on a trip to New York City, where he crosses paths with Jack (Jack Irv, the film’s co-screenwriter), an equally directionless young man who stubbornly aspires to nothing beyond his thankless clerk role at a pet store. The male characters quickly develop a friendship, and after having a foursome with two women, they reach an epiphany about their friendship/romantic relationship. This might be the only time in modern cinema that sexuality is approached with maturity, rather than accentuating an inherent scandalousness to sex itself. 

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From there, Alejandro and Jack devolve into a life of crime to fund independence from their parents, both trying to avoid the various third parties hired to track them down or keep an eye on them. Viewers won’t find any shocks in their routine armed robbery schemes, and the only times Pet Shop Days finds a pulse are the brief moments where supporting teenage characters highlight that there’s nothing shocking about their rebellious ways. The defining moment emerges when Jack’s father, Francis (Willem Dafoe), incredulously responds to a crude dinner table outburst about his son performing oral sex on his partner with a laugh. It’s a level of self-awareness that’s sorely lacking elsewhere in Pet Shop Days; a moment that disrupts the monotonous, cliched rebellion of the lovers-on-the-lam story.

Pet Shop Days Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #2: Bruce LaBruce’s ‘The Visitor’

Despite finding little actual worth within the film itself, Pet Shop Days evolves some of the conventions one might expect from a queer coming-of-age movie that trades in provocation. Admittedly, when placed next to its two most apparent queer film influences — Gregg Araki’s early breakout efforts The Living End (1992) and Totally Fucked Up (1993) —  it feels lacking in the same nihilistic rebellion which helped the aforementioned films land a punch when released a decade into the AIDS pandemic, when gay sex onscreen remained a taboo. But there is one intriguing modern tweak to the formula: refusing to name the sexuality of either central character, allowing them to exist fluidly beyond labels — something which also extends to both protagonists’ gender presentations throughout (unfortunately, this is the most underwritten aspect of the drama). Araki courted controversy even within the underground film scene from his opening credits onwards, with Totally Fucked Up flashing the introductory graphic “Another Homo Movie by Greg Araki.” Schnabel doesn’t define his characters before they are introduced in a similar way during Pet Shop Days, and it’s the only aspect of his film which doesn’t feel like a cheap throwback to earlier and better orchestrated examples of onscreen queer anarchy.

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In this column, I’m always going to favor unsuccessful attempts to push the envelope within LGBTQ+ cinema, rather than ones which successfully follow the established conventions of the moment. With this in mind, I do also have to commend Schnabel for making both of Pet Shop Days’ leads grotesquely unlikable, as negative depictions of queer people onscreen still feel rare even within the boundaries of LGBTQ cinema. In an era when positive representation has been frequently reinforced, even within many indie productions at the expense of more troubled, complex characters, having a central love story between two unambiguously awful man-children is something desperately needed within the landscape. The problem is that neither is drawn with a particular richness, as their gradual relationship together is far less revelatory than their ongoing parental squabbles, along with laundry list of mommy/daddy issues that would exhaust Sigmund Freud. It often feels like Schnabel, Irv and their co-screenwriter Galen Core reverse-engineered their screenplay, knowing they wanted a messier, more rebellious queer story than what’s currently in vogue in indie cinema, and focused more on what they believed would be provocative at expense of the story itself. I can hardly blame them for this approach — great queer films are made with far more regularity now, but so few on this level can be considered anything other than respectable — but it does come across as unbearably forced in the finished product. 

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The biggest problem with Pet Shop Days is the extent to which it feels indebted to both an earlier wave of rebellious LGBTQ cinema and current trends in American independent filmmaking, never finding a distinct identity beyond homage. Yes, a queer movie with a soul this dark and unsparing is needed outside of the underground right now, but one which just repurposes the stylistic and narrative tropes of its predecessors is never going to land with the same impact.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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