Sean Baker makes movies about people living on the margins, and he does it with a specificity and empathy that never tips into condescension. Anora continues that project with his most ambitious film yet, a story that moves from the neon glow of a strip club to the lavish excess of a Brighton Beach mansion to a chaotic scramble through the streets of Las Vegas, all while telling a love story that’s as painful as it is funny. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the recognition feels both overdue for Baker and perfectly timed for a movie this alive.
Mikey Madison plays Ani, a young sex worker at a club in Brooklyn who catches the eye of Ivan, the reckless son of a Russian oligarch. What follows starts as a Cinderella fantasy, all spontaneous Vegas trips and impulsive proposals, before the fairy tale gets bulldozed by the reality of class, family power, and the disposability of people without money. The movie’s genius is in how it handles that transition, not as a twist but as an inevitability that Ani fights against with everything she has.
Mikey Madison and the Performance of the Year
Madison’s performance is the kind that redefines what you think an actor is capable of. Ani is fierce, funny, vulnerable, street-smart, and refusing to be pitied, all at once. Madison makes her feel like a fully formed human being from her first scene, and then spends the rest of the movie peeling back layers without ever losing the character’s essential toughness. When the fairy tale collapses, Madison doesn’t play Ani as a victim. She plays her as someone who’s been discarded before and knows exactly how it feels but still has the fury to fight it.
The chemistry between Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan is essential to the film’s opening act working. Their courtship is propulsive and intoxicating, full of bad decisions that feel great in the moment. Eydelshteyn plays Ivan as charming and childish in equal measure, a young man who has the resources to make grand romantic gestures but none of the maturity to follow through on them. The movie doesn’t villainize him exactly, but it sees him clearly: he’s playing at life, and Ani is living it.
Baker’s direction is his most controlled and kinetic work simultaneously. The film moves with the energy of a screwball comedy in its first act, slows to a tense standoff in its middle, and builds to a final sequence that’s so emotionally precise it’s almost unbearable. Baker shoots Madison’s face in the closing moments with a directness that strips away everything except raw feeling, and the result is one of the most powerful final shots in recent cinema.
The supporting cast fills the movie with texture. Yura Borisov as Igor, one of the men sent to clean up the mess of Ivan’s marriage, delivers a quietly extraordinary performance. His presence grows across the film, and the way Baker uses him in the final act transforms the movie’s emotional landscape without a single grand speech. Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan as the other fixers bring a comic energy to the middle section that keeps the film from becoming grim, turning what could be a hostage scenario into something closer to a chaotic family argument.
The production design and cinematography deserve attention for how they chart Ani’s journey through economic spaces. The strip club has its own beauty and rhythm. Ivan’s mansion is garish and hollow. The streets and cars and cheap motels of the film’s second half feel real in a way that the mansion never does, which is Baker’s point. The movie understands that wealth is performance and precarity is where real life happens.
The Second Half’s Tonal Gamble
The shift from romantic comedy to something harder will challenge some viewers. The movie essentially changes genre at its midpoint, and the freewheeling energy of the first act gives way to a more combative, claustrophobic dynamic. Viewers who fell in love with the Cinderella fantasy might feel whiplashed by how aggressively the film dismantles it. Baker doesn’t offer a safety net: the fairy tale doesn’t just end, it was never real, and the movie is unflinching about showing that.
The runtime at 139 minutes is felt, particularly in the middle section where Ani is essentially trapped with the men sent to retrieve Ivan. While these scenes contain some of the film’s best comedy and most important character work, the pacing slows enough that some viewers will feel the length. Baker lets scenes run, which serves the characters but occasionally tests patience.
Ivan’s absence from large portions of the film is a structural choice that works thematically but creates a gap in the movie’s energy. The film is essentially about what happens when the prince leaves the story, and that absence is the point, but losing Eydelshteyn’s charisma for extended stretches means the film has to generate momentum differently. It manages this through the dynamics between Ani and her captors, but it’s a less immediately entertaining register than the courtship.
The ending will divide audiences not because it’s ambiguous but because it’s honest in a way that’s difficult to sit with. Baker doesn’t offer easy resolution or catharsis. The final moments are a confrontation with everything the movie has been saying about power, class, and the cost of vulnerability. Some viewers will find it devastatingly perfect. Others will want more closure than Baker is willing to provide.
A Film About Who Gets to Dream
Anora’s deepest concern is with the gap between the stories we’re told about love and upward mobility and the reality of how those stories play out for people without safety nets. Ani isn’t naive. She knows what she’s doing when she marries Ivan, and the movie respects her agency throughout. But it also shows, with painful clarity, that agency isn’t enough when the system is designed to protect some people and discard others. The film earns its emotional devastation because it never treats Ani as a symbol. She’s specific, complicated, and fully human, which makes what happens to her matter more.
Baker’s career has been building toward a film with this scope, and he handles the expansion without losing the intimacy that defines his work. Anora feels like a major film by a major director, the kind of movie that reminds you what cinema can do when it commits to telling a specific story about specific people with absolute conviction.
Should You Watch Anora?
If you respond to films that combine humor, heartbreak, and unflinching social observation, Anora is essential viewing. Mikey Madison’s performance alone justifies the ticket price, and Baker’s direction is his most accomplished work. The film rewards viewers who are willing to follow it through its tonal shifts and sit with its uncomfortable conclusions.
If you prefer your romantic stories to end on a hopeful note, or if tonal shifts between comedy and drama throw you off, Anora will be a rougher experience. The film is intentionally abrasive in its second half, and it refuses to provide the emotional comfort that its first act seems to promise. That refusal is what makes it great, but it’s not for everyone.
The Verdict on Anora
Anora is a masterful, furious, heartbreaking film that announces Mikey Madison as a force of nature and confirms Sean Baker as one of American cinema’s essential voices. It starts as a fantasy and ends as a reckoning, and the space between those two things is where the movie lives and breathes. The Palme d’Or is deserved. The performance at its center is unforgettable. And the final shot is the kind of thing you carry with you long after the credits end. This is filmmaking at the highest level, messy and precise and completely alive.