Anora Final spoilers follow.
After the dazzling Cinderella story of Anora‘S The first half goes awry with the screwball comedy of the second half, the film’s quietly dark ending seemingly coming out of nowhere. But in a film that takes every opportunity to subvert expectations, the emotional final note feels like the only ending that could make sense.
Anora sees firecracker sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) meet her soon-to-be short-lived husband Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) one night while working at a strip club on Brighton Beach. Vanya, the son of a shady Russian oligarch, spends his lavish days, on his father’s dime, drinking and Call of duty.
The pair initially hit it off Beautiful woman-style bargain to spend the week together, which escalates to a quick trip down the aisle during a bow in Las Vegas. Once Vanya’s family gets wind of the marriage, Toros (played by longtime Sean Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian) and his muscles grow stronger and the fairytale plunges into a slapstick farce of Cronenberg’s Eastern promises.
Among the dim-witted henchmen who descend on Vanya’s man-child mansion is Igor (Yura Borisov – who directed Baker described as “the Ryan Gosling of Russia”), a timid Kronk-like figure who begins to fall in love with Ani while forcibly holding her down.
Universal
Before the idea of a stripper being taken away by a crazy rich kid ever crossed his mind, Baker thought his next film would be a Russian gangster film. Those first seeds are taking shape with Vanya’s Three Stooges handlers.
We’re ready for some level of violence in organized crime films involving Russians, so once they show up there’s an expectation Anora will take a darker turn. At this point, the disarming Vanya runs away and hikes up his pants, leaving Ani to fight Igor and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), severely damaging the latter’s nasal cavity.
But even as the scene ramps up, nothing essentially terrible happens – there’s a less well-executed version of this that ends with Ani’s death. Instead, their incompetence is reassuring and sets the stage for another surprising change in the story.
As they follow the Coney Island boardwalk in search of Vanya’s jet-black pilots, Igor’s meaningful glances at Ani indicate a new romance is brewing.
Universal
By the time Igor shows Ani that he has taken back her engagement ring, surrounded by a New York snowstorm and to the soundtrack of his grandmother’s creaking windshield wiper, they have a shared understanding. Both live at the whims of the rich.
Ani then initiates sex with Igor, but when he takes her for a kiss, her tough shell bursts and she bursts into tears. It’s like the weight of the hellish past days comes crashing down all at once.
There is sex that is and is not transactional in the film – this final scene treads the line between the two, as Igor seems to want the former, while Ani seems to want the latter.
Yet the moment is also crucially not linked to Ani’s sex work, something Baker has destigmatized at the heart of his films. The early strip club scenes are injected with a sense of Take That soundtrack fun, rather than their threadbare portrayal as seedy and degrading places.
In that setting, Ani is smart. But as she leaves the headquarters, she shares her dreams of a Disneyland honeymoon and truly believes she has found a way out.
Universal
The arrival of Vanya’s terrifying mother – the apron strings are still attached – contributes to the realization of a system that targets the working class. It’s not the first film to reference the misnomer of the US as the ‘Land of Opportunity’, but it does so with a winning quality and empathy for the class positions of both its henchmen and sex workers.
The reality of Ani’s dashed hopes finally comes into view, as the financial opportunity slips away and her audit performance collapses.
Once more, Anora defies expectations and refuses to give the cheap fuss of a triumphant final note. In another film, Ani might have been able to capture or win the man from the Russian money, as she briefly tells Vanya’s mother that she might be able to.
For a film that keeps you guessing, this is a fitting conclusion. The moment is so open-ended Baker wrote an epilogue only for the eyes of the actors. But would we really want the easy answer to the question of what comes next?
Instead, after two hours of momentum, the fact of this melancholy and somewhat disappointing coda gives us a little insight into Ani’s own feelings about such monumental hopes being dashed.
Anora is out now in US and UK cinemas.
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Deputy TV editor
Formerly a TV reporter at The mirrorRebecca can now be found providing expert analysis of the TV landscape Digital spywhile on the BBC or Times Radio she doesn’t talk about anything from the final season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus for whatever chaos unfolds in the different Love Island villas.
When she’s not binging on a box set, Rebecca’s sightings in the wild include stints on the National TV Awards and the BAFTA red carpets, and post-match video explainers from the reality TV we all watch to look.