Anora (2024)
Sean Baker has spent the better part of two decades making films about people living at the edges of the American dream, and Anora is, in many respects, the moment that world broke through to the mainstream. Shot on location across Brooklyn and New York City, the film follows Anora, known to most as Ani, a young sex worker whose whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch throws her headlong into a collision between fantasy and money, between feeling and transaction. The premise has the bones of a classic Cinderella story, and Baker is well aware of that, though his instinct has always been to prod at the fairy tale rather than simply retell it. The film premiered at Cannes in May 2024, where it won the Palme d'Or, and went on to collect five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. For an independent production from Cre Film and FilmNation Entertainment, made without the infrastructure of a major studio, that is a genuinely remarkable trajectory.
Baker wrote and directed the film himself, as has been his habit throughout his career, and he also edited it, which matters more here than it might elsewhere. At 139 minutes, Anora moves through two quite different registers, and the cutting is doing real structural work, calibrating exactly when the film's comic energy tips over into something more bruising. Baker has form with this kind of tonal balancing act. I also covered his earlier Tangerine (2015), which was shot on an iPhone 5S and announced him as a film-maker with a particular gift for finding warmth in precarious lives, and the same instinct runs through Anora, even when the film is operating at a louder, brasher pitch. Drew Daniels serves as cinematographer, and the images he produces are notably flexible in mood, moving from the neon-saturated interiors of strip clubs and parties, all heat and shimmer and restless motion, to the colder, more exposed light of winter streets and unfamiliar houses. There is a texture to the photography that suits Baker's world, handheld without being showy, alive to the messiness of how people actually inhabit spaces. No composer is credited on the production, and the sound design and licensed music carry the film's audio landscape without a conventional orchestral score to lean on.
Mikey Madison carries the film as Ani, and it is a performance that refuses easy sympathy as a matter of principle. Madison, perhaps best known to audiences for Scream (2022) and its sequel, is asked here to hold together a character who is prickly, strategic, and frequently hard to read, and to make that quality feel earned rather than alienating. Opposite her, Mark Eydelshteyn plays Ivan, the wealthy young Russian whose impulsiveness sets the whole plot in motion. Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan round out a cast that largely fills the film's second half, as the mechanics of the annulment plot bring a succession of fixers, negotiators, and family emissaries into Ani's orbit. There is a long tradition of films using the immigrant or outsider experience to refract something essential about New York, and Anora, with its mix of Russian, Armenian, and American characters, sits comfortably within that. For a companion piece that approaches similar working-class textures from a very different angle, see also The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye's portrait of lives reconstructed at the margins of visibility.
Anora is a film of two halves, and I came away having enjoyed it a great deal, even though the first of those halves came close to losing me.
Sean Baker's 2024 picture went on to sweep the Oscars, Best Picture and Best Director among them, and it is easy enough to see why, though I would stop just short of the greatness almost everyone else has handed it.
The first half, frankly, plays like softcore. It is wall to wall erotic dancing, nudity, sex, drugs and booze, and for a good stretch I struggled to warm to Ani at all. Mikey Madison plays her as brittle and prickly, all transactional edges, chasing money above everything and dressing it up, in the fashionable way, as owning her own story. Opposite her, Mark Eydelshteyn is nicely cast as Ivan, the spoilt, childish son of Russian wealth who treats her, and everyone else, as a plaything he has not yet grown bored of.
The second half is where it truly kicks into gear. Once Ani and Ivan marry, something shifts, and for the first time you sense her actually enjoying his company, even as a doubt keeps nagging away that she may still be eyeing the whole thing as a meal ticket for life. Then Ivan's family get wind of the marriage, and their Armenian heavies spend the rest of the film hunting him down while holding Ani as hostage and bargaining chip, desperate to force an annulment.
It builds to a heartbreaking stretch where everything comes apart for her, and you start to wonder whether she cared for this overgrown boy after all. This is Baker doing what he does best, the same compassion for people on the margins that ran right through Tangerine, comedy curdling into something that aches.
That Mikey Madison walked away with an Oscar for this does not surprise me one bit, whatever my reservations about how likeable Ani reads on paper, because the performance holds the whole thing together.
It falls short of greatness for me, those lopsided halves keeping it just below the top rung, but it is a really good film and a thoroughly deserving awards story. Four stars, and further proof that Sean Baker is one of the most interesting film-makers working in America right now.
Anora arrives as both a personal and a commercial vindication for Baker, proof that the compassion and precision he has been applying to small-scale stories for years can sustain a film that the industry's biggest night chose to celebrate. Whether it fully earns the unanimous praise is a question worth sitting with, and one the review above addresses honestly. What is beyond argument is that it represents a particular kind of American independent film-making at a high point of craft and confidence, and that Mikey Madison's performance is the kind that lingers. The Palme d'Or and the Oscar rarely agree on the same film in the same year. When they do, it is worth paying attention, even if you end up reserving a little room for doubt.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-09-11
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Anora (2024) on YouTube
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