Anora Review – A Very Unconventional Rom-Com

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

Sean Baker is an empathetic filmmaker. His films often focus on the marginalized in society. His latest, Anora, is most certainly no exception. It tells the unconventional and unflinching story of a sex worker falling in love. Let’s be clear, though: This is not Pretty Woman.

Anora (Mikey Madison), aka Ani, is a stripper living in Brooklyn. While working at the club one night, because she knows Russian, she is asked to serve a Russian patron, a young man named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn). Vanya asks to see Ani outside of work and invites her over to his swanky house. The two start to spend more and more time together, with Vanya ultimately paying her to be his girlfriend for a week. 

As the week nears an end, they fly to Vegas on a whim and get married. This sets off a firestorm, as Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, tells no one in his family. They are shocked and outraged that their son married a stripper and tasked his godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian), with getting the marriage annulled. 

Ani is unashamed and unafraid. Despite trying to maintain a professional front, she pretty clearly develops feelings for Vanya as they spend more and more time together. Their relationship is entirely impulsive, including the jaunt to Vegas that results in their quickie marriage. Their impulsivity leads to the conflicts that make up the second half of the film when it starts to become an open question of whether Vanya feels the same for Ani or if he’s just using her to avoid his familial responsibilities.

Mikey Madison is a force of nature in this movie, making Ani a firecracker who is more than willing to speak her mind and willing to fight, quite literally, to save her marriage. We first see her interacting with various customers in the strip club. We catch glimpses of her personal life outside of the club and apart from Vanya, which hint at a frosty relationship between her and her roommate with whom she shares a house.

She doesn’t seem like someone who has many personal connections, and given how quickly she falls in with Vanya and his friends, she may be desperate to save her marriage more out of having a personal relationship than because she thinks it is true love.

In fact, the more of Vanya that Baker reveals to the audience, the more it is worth questioning what she really sees in the guy. While he is college-age, he acts much younger; when he’s not playing video games, he is partying, drinking, and doing drugs, which is not exactly why his parents sent him to America. A very important inflection point in the movie is what Vanya decides to do when confronted by his godfather Toros and his two henchmen, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov). It informs the audience just how much Vanya truly lacks in maturity.

The film changes gears when Toros, Garnick, and Igor come into play and change into a much funnier tone than it takes in the first half. There is a manic energy at play when the three of them try to reason with Vanya and Ani, and things get increasingly out of control while they try to keep things calm. Ani is not interested in anything they have planned. Neither Igor nor Garnick are typical henchmen; Baker’s empathy manages to humanize both of them as well. And if there is a funnier movie moment in 2024 than Toros and his reaction to finding out about Vanya’s marriage while attending an infant baptism, I have yet to see it.

This movie earns every bit of its R-rating, with extended sex scenes and scenes at the strip club. Baker has never been one to shy away from the reality of the world his characters inhabit. He is also judgment-free with what he presents. Most of the nudity and sexual content is in the first half of the film, save for the very end.

Without going into detail, in addition to having one of the funniest moments of the year, the ending is also one of the best endings of the year. It’s a moment the film builds to organically and has a level of vulnerability that is expertly executed.

Anora is yet another film from Sean Baker that deserves a larger audience and all the accolades it is being showered with. Sometimes, you want and expect directors who start small to move to bigger studio projects with bigger budgets. Baker is in the sweet spot right now, and I kind of hope he keeps making movies like this instead of studio fare for the rest of his life. Mikey Madison gives a breakout lead performance, too. Anora is one of the best movies of 2024.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars