A fable, a thriller, a subdued comedy and a cryptic love story, Anora is also the winner of five Oscars and confirmed the arrival of Sean Baker at the top of the film-making tree. This appeared to have started with his breakthrough, 2015’s Tangerine – the one shot on an iPhone – but in fact got going 15 years, four features, a couple of shorts and several episodes of TV earlier. Note to self, having seen all the post-Tangerine stuff (The Florida Project, Red Rocket and now Anora) isn’t it time to have a look at Baker’s earlier work?
One of those Oscars went to Mikey Madison, a firecracker as a lapdancer with a side hustle in sex work who gets chummy, very chummy, with the son of a Russian oligarch, too close for the liking of his parents, who send in a fixer to nip the couple’s shenanigans in the bud.
That’s the entire movie – the meeting at a club. Anora, grand-daughter of a Russian immigrant, getting to know Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn selling entitlement as almost adorable) over drinks, chitchat in faltering Russian followed by a private dance. Getting to know him better at his extremely swish pad the following day. Then a montage of fun à la billionaire – flying to Vegas in the private jet, partying every night like it’s the end of the century – before things get too serious and fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) arrives with a pair of goons to break the couple apart.
Karagulian performs in this film the same function as Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, and he cuts a similarly charismatic, semi-funny, semi-terrifying dash. It’s the sequence where Toros and henchmen Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) take over Vanya’s apartment – against Vanya’s protests and threats – that are the film’s centrepiece and also the bit that most probably won Madison her gold statuette and Baker his other Oscars. Madison is at banshee-howl here but it’s superbly played all round, and composed as a mass of clever cameras, angles and edits.
We’re in a Tarantino re-discovery moment and in Anora there is plenty of QT. But there’s also a lot of Billy Wilder, in the way Baker flies comedy beneath the thriller radar and sets up a second romance while the one between Ani and Vanya is still in full spate.
It’s also a satire on how the top 0.01% live, if you like. But in many respects the fascinating story (just how interested is Anora in Vanya?) is the least compelling bit of the film, which derives its power from the artistry of its director, who can do “for real” scenes like almost no one else and summons performances of a lifetime out of everyone involved. As well as Karagulian and Madison, I liked Borisov’s turns as goon Igor, who, it’s obvious, is being saved for some late-developing plot strand and rewards Baker’s investment with a dry, almost comedic stoicism (he is also very good in Compartment No. 6 and Petrov’s Flu, if you want to see more of him).
Madison takes her clothes off a lot and portrays Ani as a transactional kind of gal but not one without a heart. Ani does sex for cash but it never seems entirely sleazy. Silly as it sounds, Ani is some sort of fairytale princess, with Vanya the latest of many frogs she has kissed. In interviews Madison has said that she saw her nudity as a costume and while that sounds like a load of actorly blah, that’s exactly how it comes across.
There are scenes set in the murky and atmospheric club and others in the bright, clean apartment where Vanya repeatedly re-invents the concept of the premature ejaculator. The home invasion sequence (ten days shooting apparently). An extended montage of Toros, the goons and Ani in tow touring nighttime New York looking for Vanya. Late on, the arrival of the parents themselves – stern mother Galina (Darya Ekamasova) and too-rich-to-care father Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov). In each different situation Baker demonstrates his ability to rack up tension and yet keep a sense of looseness. It’s remarkable and makes the film grippingly immediate. That, for me, is why you should watch this film.
And if you want to see it all as some kind of cosmic statement on an individual’s inability to escape their ethnicity – “Ani”, she insists on being called, but “Anora” is how the guys from the old country address her – there is that too.
Anora – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
