Anora (2024) review

Dir. Sean Baker

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

Sean Baker’s Anora functions on two different plains, both nostalgically and progressively. Its first goal is to be a character study of Mikey Madison, who plays the titular sex worker from Brighton Beach, who falls madly in love with a silver spoon Russian playboy named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). Its second goal is to soar to the same manic heights as 80s comedies like After Hours, which revolved around a night so crazy that nobody would believe it, even if they lived it. The last film to succeed on such a playing field was probably the Safdie brothers’ Good Time in 2017.

Madison’s name might be Anora, but she prefers “Ani,” loathing her “stupid Uzbek name.” She works in a strip club outside New York City, and devotes her off-hours to clients willing to shell out enough money to justify her forfeiting her own free time. She speaks a little Russian, which is why her boss asks her to wait on Ivan Zakharov, the son of a Russian oligarch, who is so smitten with his lap dance that he takes her back to his sprawling mansion.

After a few days and a raucous New Year’s Eve party, Ivan shells out $15,000 for Ani to treat him to “the girlfriend experience,” as it’s known. The two spend the entire week drinking, drugging, humping, and partying, and when it’s just about over, Ivan asks if she’d like it to continue… by eloping in Las Vegas. Word gets back to Ivan’s controlling (and presumably dangerous) parents, that their unsupervised boy has done the unthinkable in marrying a hooker. Before they can fly back, they arrange for three goons — a bumbling Armenian named Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and a quiet Russian named Igor (Yura Borisov), who both take orders from their handler Toros (Karren Karagulian) — to storm Ivan’s mansion and confront them. Ivan dips on foot, leaving Ani to be harassed by the men, who plan to hold her long enough to annul the marriage the following day. However, now they have to find Ivan, which is no easy task in a city as big as the Big Apple.

For an extended stretch after Ivan leaves the mansion, Baker focuses on this motley crew. This stretch could be called “Three Stooges and a Stripper,” as Baker pumps the sequence full of slapstick comedy, obscenities, and a whole lot of yelling. A smart, skillful writer, Baker lets us learn a lot about his characters during this time. Garnick is basically incapacitated after Ani kicks him in the fast, and Igor’s subtle yet thoughtful actions towards Ani suggest he’s not as brutish as someone like Toros, who is ruthless in his threats.

Since his beautiful directorial debut The Florida Project, Baker has gravitated towards stories about society’s disenfranchised, sex workers in particular. His 2021 film Red Rocket focused on the life of a newly retired porn star who sought to return to his previous life. Furthermore, he takes actors who are up-and-coming or complete unknowns and gives them a role that we’d expect from them after they hit stardom. With Anora, Baker merges a self-sufficient sex worker’s life with that of unquestioned opulence. He has no problem trading in the slums of the Sunshine State for mansions and dingy night-clubs, many of which seen up-close-and-personal in the foursome’s tireless pursuit of Ivan into the wee hours of the morning.

Like he did for the wonderful Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project, and actor/rapper Simon Rex in Red Rocket, Baker gifts Mikey Madison the role of a lifetime. The 25-year-old actress nails the attitude, tonal shifts, and physicality required for someone as deceptively complex as Ani. This is one of those films that keeps you laughing hysterically as if to forget how deeply tragic this story ultimately is. Here is Ani, someone who believes she’s finally found love, only to find herself victim to assault, kidnapping, and many other unimaginable crimes at the hands of man, ones we can infer she’s used to at least from the periphery. The tenderest moments in Anora come in its final act, when the madness slows down, and the reality of this miserable situation sets in for both her and the audience. It’s Igor who tries to help her, but Ani doesn’t know how to respond to genuine niceness from a man, debatably the first one in many moons that didn’t have a relationship with her that was exclusively transactional.

Baker’s writing is excellent, and his directing is its slickest yet — a wonderful tracking shot chronicles a simultaneous brawl and group party all while DMX’s “Where the Hood At” blares on the overhead speakers. That said, don’t sleep on how much this movie is carried by Madison’s personality as well as Borisov’s ability to convey so much by seemingly doing so little.

Profane and profound, hilarious and heartbreaking, Anora is a contemporaneous fairy-tale for an unlikely princess, its titular character, one that infuses so much kinetic and slapstick energy that by the time the climax hits, you might be alarmed by how the film confronts you with raw, complex emotion. It’s not an oversight on your part, but a sign of a fantastic movie from a bold filmmaker.

Starring: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Aleksei Serebryakov. Directed by: Sean Baker.