Anora Movie Review

Sean Baker's very best.

Anora is the new Sean Baker flick starring Mikey Madison. From the moment I saw Mikey in Scream, I knew she was gonna go far, and this performance deserves every award. The film follows Anora, a sex worker, as she meets and eventually marries a young, rich Russian, Timothee Chalamet, named Ivan. After meeting her at the club she works at, he decides to make her exclusively his and pays for all of her time. During this time, the pair find themselves with Ivan's friends heading to Las Vegas, where, after nights of sex, drugs, and partying, Ivan decides he doesn’t want the fun to end and proposes to Anora. After the dust has settled, Ivan finds that his real life is now finding out about his recent activities, and that pisses off his parents, who are frightened of how this will make their family look and decide, now is the time to “take care of this situation.” The Honeymoon is over.

This film, as I said, is Sean Baker’s best. The previous projects always fell somewhat short for me. The Florida Project is one of his most popular, and even though it does have such a real/authentic world built, it’s a slice of life that is just a little boring. Anora does still have the charm and feel of his previous projects but is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. The scene where Anora and Ivan are getting confronted by people hired by Ivans parents will stick with me for a lifetime. It genuinely had me and my entire theater dying laughing.

I will say I don’t love the ending. Something about it, the more I sit with it and justify it in my head, I still don’t love it. Spoilers ahead. Ivan runs away from both Anora and the people his parents have hired to make them get their marriage annulled. After they eventually catch Ivan, his parents have also flown in from Russia, where all of them take their private jet back to Las Vegas. Anora, at this point, has been through hell and back and doesn’t understand why Ivan doesn’t just stand up to his parents so they can stay married. Ivan ends up telling her that it’s over and he will do exactly as his parents say. There is a small glimmer of hope when Anora threatens to get a lawyer and attempt to take half of their money in divorce court, and I was hyped. I was hoping the movie was going to end in her no longer having to go back to the strip club, buying her and her sister a house, and living lavishly in her new fortune, but alas, a single threat from Ivans's mother and she boards the jet to get her marriage annulled.

After the inevitable annulment, she returns home with nothing and has sex with a man who was incredibly nice to her but also tied her up and ends up in tears. While I’m not saying this ending doesn’t make sense, obviously, she had been through a lot of trauma and physical pain by the end of the movie, but do I need ANOTHER movie where women suffer? Is it too much to ask that I can watch a movie where the woman gets one over and gets the life she deserves by the end? While I know movies like that exist, I can hear the argument, and I do agree that what makes Sean Baker's flicks the most authentic is that, in real life, you don’t get everything you want and more. It is a little “side eye” that in every movie of Sean’s, women are placed in these compromising positions, fighting for survival in whichever way they can, then left at the end without anything and roll credits. All I’m asking for, Sean, in the next one, let's let the women win just once.

I try not to let this affect how I feel overall about the movie, as, again, the hype around it is justified. If you have the opportunity, watch it, and please let us know your thoughts.