‘Anora’ movie review: Sean Baker’s kitsch working-class fantasy is stripped off any nuance

A still from ‘Anora’
| Photo Credit: Neon

Sean Baker has built his career peeling back the tattered sequins of the American Dream, revealing it as either a grand cosmic gag or a long con perpetuated by those with just the right mix of shamelessness and dumb luck. His latest, and the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, as well as current Oscar Best Picture favourite, Anora, is his gaudiest, most ambitious effort yet. The film is a raucous, whiplash-inducing satire of the American Dream as seen through the eyes of the titular New Yorker stripper who accidentally weds into Russian oligarch wealth, only to find herself dodging bumbling enforcers like she’s in a Grand Theft Auto side quest.

Mikey Madison’s ‘Ani’ is the kind of underdog survivor Baker loves: tough, motor-mouthed, and in a constant state of financial freefall. She’s a stripper and an escort, not naive to the power dynamics of cash, sex, and desperation, but also not quite as in control of them as she’d like to be. Her world is the backrooms of dingy clubs, the small-talk economics of lap dances, and the ebb and flow of men’s attention dictating her livelihood.

But when she meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a baby-faced trust-fund doofus of an heir to the Russian oligarchy, she suddenly finds herself in Neon’s relentlessly marketed ‘modern-day Cinderella story’ and the chance to break free. Vegas, a wedding, 3 carats, maybe 4,5 or 6. And Ani’s fairytale has come true.

And here’s where Baker makes his first big ask of his audience: he wants us to believe Ani actually buys into this fantasy. She doesn’t just see Vanya as a cash cow, rather fully believes, at least for a delusional few moments, that she has won the game. But Vanya is exactly what we suspect him to be: a wet paper bag of a man, easily torn apart at the first sign of pressure. The second his family’s henchmen show up, he folds, and cartoonishly vanishes, leaving Ani behind with the trio of bumbling Russian goons tasked with handling the problem. What follows is a frantic Safdie brothers-scramble through the underbelly of Brighton Beach, with people yelling at each other and throwing up in SUVs. Ani is yanked from one encounter to the next, struggling to cash out on her accidental jackpot before her in-law’s men can strong-arm her into signing it away. 

A still from ‘Anora’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

Baker is at his best when he’s exploring the unspoken rules of how class, sex, and money shape the margins of people’s lives. Anora flirts with these themes but they’re too scattered in its own momentum for us to feel anything meaningful. Ani is smart, but she’s also weirdly naive in ways that feel necessary for the plot to progress. She’s not stupid, but she’s asked to play dumb, again and again, so that the film can keep pulling the rug out from under her, making her feel like a marionette in Baker’s fine-tuned chaos rather than a fully realised person.

And Mikey is mesmerising — her Brooklyn-accented bravado masking a deep well of vulnerability, somehow keeping Ani’s head above water even as the script keeps dunking her under. But Baker sets her on a frustrating path that keeps her running, scrambling, and then, at the last second, pulls off a bleakly ironic finale that’s not anywhere near as thought-provoking as teased. He clearly wants the tone of the film to feel like the breathless, sweat-drenched ride that was Uncut Gems, only the self-destruction of Adam Sandler’s Howard felt like a natural extension of who he was, while Anora feels like it’s punishing its lead simply because it can.

A still from ‘Anora’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

Baker’s camera lingers on Ani’s body with the familiar, fetishised devotion of a filmmaker who wants to have it both ways — gawking while pretending not to and aestheticising while claiming to deconstruct. It’s not that a film about a sex worker shouldn’t luxuriate in her world, or even linger a moment longer over the normalised relentlessness of the hustle, but Anora never quite grants its heroine the agency it pretends to. It repackages the same old (and notoriously intimacy coordinator-free) spectacle in the language of liberation, as if framing Ani’s endless undress as gritty vérité somehow erases the choreography of objectification. The subversion never truly arrives — only a slicker, more self-satisfied version of the gaze it purportedly dismantles. Baker has always been at his best capturing the lives of those on society’s fringes, but here, he seems too entranced by the performance of sex work to meaningfully explore the person behind it.

Still, Sean Baker remains one of the most vital voices in American indie filmmaking, and Anora is another beguiling, hyperactive entry into his body of work through which he wants to say something about class, power, and survival in an era when wealth is more impenetrable than ever. But unlike The Florida Project, which found hope in struggle, or Red Rocket, which dissected charisma as a weapon, Anora doesn’t quite know what it wants to say about its protagonist.

Anora is currently available to rent or purchase on BookMyShow Stream. It will also be screened at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2025