Petey has been waiting. Standing exactly where he was left, holding onto a signal and a promise, he has spent what sounds like a very long time calling out to someone who traveled halfway across the galaxy and never came back. That someone is Allen, and the trailer for Netflix’s upcoming film makes one thing immediately clear: this reunion was always going to be complicated. The story of a grown man and the alien best friend he made as a child, ‘Allen’ looks like the kind of film that asks what happens when the most important friendship of your life belongs to a version of you that no longer exists.
The trailer opens on that signal, a recurring call Petey sends out into wherever Allen has been, paired with a childhood promise that the two would stay together forever. When Allen finally does return, Petey’s world shifts fast. He introduces himself with the urgency of someone who has rehearsed this moment many times: ‘This is Petey, by the way. I’m right where you left me.’ He has a job now, at a shop, which he describes as being ‘kind of like president.’ He has things to tell Allen. A lot of things.
The little boy still in there
The emotional core of what the trailer is selling lands in a single exchange. When Allen registers that Petey has grown up, Petey pushes back: ‘That little boy, he’s still here. Inside of me.’ Allen’s response, delivered with what reads as genuine alien bafflement, is to ask whether Petey literally ate the child. The clarification that follows, ‘No, no, no! I am Peedee!’, sets the tone for a film that seems to be threading comedy and genuine feeling through the same needle. Not every adult who had an extraordinary childhood friendship gets to explain the concept of growing up to the friend who missed all of it.
When the reunion gets messy
The people around Petey are less convinced. One voice in the trailer cuts through the warmth with a flat challenge: ‘Allen didn’t come halfway across the galaxy just to hang out with you.’ Petey’s answer is quiet and completely certain. ‘Yeah, Jaden, he did.’ But Allen himself eventually delivers what sounds like the film’s central complication, the suggestion that his return has not been entirely good for Petey’s life. ‘Allen ruin Peedee’s life,’ Allen says, and Petey’s response, ‘How could you do this to me?’, lands somewhere between heartbreak and farce. Netflix has not yet confirmed a specific release date beyond the production window.
The promise that started all of it
The detail that sits with you after the trailer ends is the signal itself, the recurring transmission Petey has been sending out, apparently for years, so that Allen could follow it home.
Petey is still at the shop. Still sending the signal. Still, in every way that matters to him, right where Allen left him.
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