Anora-Movie Review
There are not many movies like this one. Not at all. Anora is a minor masterpiece, a perfect slice of life that eats at you with it’s realness, it’s sadness and it’s grim beauty. As you may know, it won Best Picture at the Oscars and I think it was actually completely deserved. It’s a seemingly small story, but the character and style of this film makes it feel very important, perhaps paradoxically because it feels so down to earth. This movie is raw in a way few modern films are. It’s a story that can get away with being so skeletal because of how innately chocked with real life it is. Anora is a joy to watch, even when it’s making you sad or uncomfortable or nervous.
A lot of that greatness comes down to the performances, none more than that of Mikey Madison as Anora “Ani” Mikheeva. Madison breathes life into the character of Ani in a way that makes us feel like we know her, or know someone like her. Some of that, admittedly, is because I know quite a few strippers. But either way, it was hard for me to look away once it began. Separating out even the individual quirks of Ani as a character, Madison completely nailed the vibe of modern stripper. Being a sex worker, similar to being a drug dealer, has a certain ambience. It’s an eerie blend of mundanity lent to taboo that makes everything tense but also boring. It’s the shit end of the hedonic treadmill. All the physical escapes with none of the emotional ease. In the end you just end up being broken and run down. And I’ll be damned if that’s not Ani.
This movie is an ode to execution. The best ideas die from bad performance and the most seemingly mundane can be lifted by good performance. What you have here is a story that straddles and distorts that line, telling a story that elevates everyday life into something dramatic and elegant while losing none of the grit and grime that underlies it. It anchors it’s power in it’s characters and drills into their central archetypes for conflict, often finding pain, discontent and boredom. There’s a yearning present throughout, for freedom: freedom from pain, freedom from poverty and freedom from work. But the search for these freedoms is not noble or active, but rather it is a gnawing passive anxiety that feels is immensely relatable even if it is hard to put into words. And Ani, young, poor, beautiful and sad, is the perfect vessel for search a journey.
Anora follows a stripper, our Ani (Mikey Madison), who becomes involved with the son of a Russian oligarch, Vanka (played by Mark Eydelshteyn). Their developing relationship takes up the first 45 minutes or so of the film and is a strangely engrossing segment. Some of that is the ultra-grounded, contemporary style of these sequences, which are well written by Baker. Some of it too is the performances, which are balanced and surprisingly nuanced for something that’s so day to day. There’s also a lot of commitment to the bit by writers and performers alike.
The physicality of the situation is present at every level. Madison performs a bunch of stripper stunts as Ani and fully embraces the physical nature of her role. There’s a good 10 minutes of ass in this film, many of which are actually sex scenes and they did this with no intimacy coordinator. It’s really ballsy for an American film and surprisingly tasteful for what it is. It’s not over the top magic sex, but it’s not PG-13 bullshit either.
The first 45 minutes of this movie fly by, up until the key moment of the film, the Vegas wedding of Anora and Vanya. Then comes the shift. Obviously, a Russian oligarch is expected to do much better than a stripper. And when Vanya’s handlers, essentially babysitter who work for his father, hear about his marriage, they rush over to try and undo the matrimony. At this point, it ceases to be about love and instead becomes tragedy. No one wants their kid to marry a stripper. And that’s the cross a stripper has to bear. But should they?
At this point we meet our next wave of characters, who are, in some ways, Stooge-esque characters. Toros(Karren Karagulian), is the head honcho of the henchmen, a veritable fixer who works for Vanya’s father. Garnik(Vache Tovmasyan), his brother, is lower down the totem pole and is seemingly the nice cop at first but quickly descends into comic relief. Finally, there is Igor(Yura Borisov), who makes an improbable leap from tertagonist to deuteragonist. For the 99% of you who made better choices and weren’t a Writing major, that means that he goes from being the fourth lead to the second lead by the end of the film. It’s a real cool journey to see and Borisov’s performance is brilliant.
The henchmen introduce some new trauma and context to what seemed to be a blissful situation and suddenly, the ugliness of the whole thing rears its head. Ani has gone from a paid fling to a paid girlfriend to a wife in 2 weeks. She barely knows Vanya and truthfully, is very much into his money as much as him. But she’s committed. She knows that she wants to do this, whether it’s to escape her situation or to simply be in a relationship with someone. And even though it’s new and uncertain, when it’s tested, Ani proves that will fight for what she has gained.
But ultimately, like many things in life, this entire deal is a house of cards and it’s fall is likely, if not inevitable. But she can’t see that and for a little bit, neither can we. But when Vanya flees and Ani is left to fend for herself against his father’s goons, it quickly becomes clear that this whole thing is a sham. This act is as hilarious as it is tense, the slow downward spiral of the situation unfolding in slow motion as the Goons and Ani go on a wild goose chase to find Vanya so that they can annul the marriage. The rising arc that defined the movie’s first act comes crashing down into a frenzied New York evening where seemingly nothing can go right.
And everything beyond there is spoilers…So we’ll circle back to the point.
Anora is a truly remarkable film. It’s gritty, poignant and authentic, a story about regular people that makes the lives of those people enthralling and magnetic and makes their struggles relatable and tragic. It’s moments feel earned, powerful and most importantly, real. The dramatic spine doesn’t need to be embellished by crazy visuals or stylistic story telling because the context is so familiar that it feels like you could almost reach out and touch it. It’s the story of a girl who has a crazy month, but not an inconceivable month. Ani is an authentic and grounded character, but if you’ve been around the right blocks, you’ve definitely met someone like her.
It’s hard to put into words how good Mikey Madison is in this movie. She brings a character that isn’t particularly unique on paper to life in a way that that is unforgettable. From the Brighton Beach accent, to the sweet but slutty aesthetic, to the underlying grit and determination, Anora is one of the best characters to grace a screen this decade. I was sad when the movie was over because it meant we wouldn’t get anymore Ani. Which is weird because I rarely feel that charmed by a performance. But this one is…everything it’s built up to be. Believe the hype.
Anora is, to my eyes, the best movie of 2024. Hell, it’s the best movie to come out since Oppenheimer in my opinion. It’s such a unique and evocative piece of art, one that feels like it brushes up against the future of storytelling yet is also firmly rooted in narrative and artistic frameworks that are a hundred, sometimes hundreds of years old. Sean Baker weaves a tale that feels as old as it is new, as real as it is fantasy and by the end, the shocking end, you’ll barely be thinking about any of that because you’ll be too busy crying.
