Anora

🧂 Anora (2024)

A Brighton Beach Cinderella story where the clock strikes midnight somewhere around minute twenty.

Directed by Sean Baker. Distributed by Neon. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 4 / 10. Mostly a love letter, but the middle stretch tests your patience on purpose. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. A ferociously well-acted screwball tragedy that earns its Palme d'Or buzz more than it earns its runtime.

Every fairy tale needs an annulment lawyer eventually.

Sean Baker has spent a career pointing his camera at sex workers and treating them like people instead of punchlines or props, and Anora is the culmination of that project dressed up as a screwball comedy. Ani (Mikey Madison, doing the best work of her career) is a stripper at a Manhattan club who gets hired for a week by Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the manic, video-game-addicted son of a Russian oligarch, and somewhere between the champagne and the impulsive Vegas wedding, she lets herself believe she's actually won something. The film knows better, and it lets you know it too, right around the time Ivan's parents find out.

The Vegas wedding is the film's high-water mark. Baker shoots the whole courtship at a breathless, coke-fueled sprint, house parties blurring into private jets blurring into a chapel, and Madison plays Ani's growing belief in her own luck with just enough guardedness that you're never sure if she's falling for Ivan or falling for the life he represents. It doesn't matter which, really, because the film is honest that both are equally fragile, and equally hers to want.

Toros, Garnick, and Igor turn the back half into a farce. Once Ivan's parents dispatch their Armenian fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his two henchmen to get the marriage annulled, Anora pivots hard into slapstick, a home invasion that turns into a genuinely painful, un-glamorous brawl where Ani fights back with everything she's got and nobody involved looks cool doing it. It's a bold structural swing, trading romance for chaos, and it mostly pays off because Baker refuses to let the violence feel cute. Somebody gets a broken nose, somebody gets hit with a phone charger, and it all just looks like what it would actually look like: ugly and undignified.

The search through Brighton Beach runs a lap too many. Once Ivan bolts and the group has to track him down across a long, increasingly frantic night, the film settles into a repetitive rhythm of car rides, phone calls, and diminishing-returns bickering that stretches a good twenty minutes past its welcome. Baker clearly wants you to feel the exhaustion of the night right alongside the characters, and he succeeds, maybe too well; there's a difference between a tired night and a tiring one, and the film occasionally lands on the wrong side of that line.

Yura Borisov's Igor is the quiet reason the ending works. Of the two henchmen, Igor barely speaks for most of the film, hanging back while Garnick does the yelling, and it would be easy to write him off as furniture. Instead Baker slowly reveals him as the only person in the entire story who looks at Ani and sees a person rather than a problem to be managed or a prize to be handled. His scenes with her in the film's final stretch, wordless, patient, decent in a way nobody else in this movie has been, do more emotional work than anything Ivan ever manages.

The final scene is the whole movie in ninety seconds. Without spelling out exactly what happens, the closing minutes strip away every bit of the film's manic comic energy and leave Ani alone with Igor in a car, and what plays out is less a romantic beat than a quiet reckoning with everything she's been pretending not to feel since the wedding. It's a gutting, un-showy final image, and it recontextualizes the entire farce that came before it as something much sadder than it let on.

So why four shakers? Because there's real craft and real feeling under the chaos, but the extended Brighton Beach search is a genuine pacing problem, not a stylistic choice you can wave away, and Ivan himself is written so thinly as a manchild that his absence for a chunk of the back half is a relief rather than a loss. Ani deserved a match her equal; the movie mostly gives her chaos and a fixer's henchman instead, which, thankfully, turns out to be the point.

The verdict: A whip-smart, big-hearted screwball tragedy anchored by a career-defining Mikey Madison performance and a devastating final scene, dragged down just enough by an overlong middle stretch to keep it out of the top tier. Sean Baker still treats his heroine with more dignity than the world she's fighting to stay in ever does.

So, did Cinderella get her happy ending? Depends entirely on what you think a happy ending is supposed to feel like.

Pass the salt. 🧂