Movie Review: 'Anora' is Among the Best of 2024

Anora

Directed by Sean Baker

Written by Sean Baker

Starring Mikey Madison

Release Date October 8th, 2024

Published October 8th, 2024

Watching Mikey Madison embody the character, Ani, a.k.a, Anora, is an electrifying experience. From the first moment you see Ani, you’re captivated by her. That’s easy for a straight white guy to say about a woman who is playing a stripper and is nude as the opening credits are still rolling, but I assure you, dear reader, this is more than mere prurient interest. Mikey Madison’s magnetism and vibrant life emanates from her entire presence and that becomes clear as this strange story unfolds.

Ani is a stripper and sex worker who meets a young, naive Russian nepo-baby named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) when he comes into the club where she dances seeking a woman who can speak Russian. Ani has a vague handle on the language and is given the task of showing Vanya a good time. It goes really well, Vanya has a lot of money and isn’t afraid to splash it around. Eventually, he starts asking about seeing her outside the club, coded language telling us he’s talking about paying for sex. She gives him her phone number and the hook up is planned.

Rolling up to Vanya’s extraordinary mansion, Ani is intoxicated by the wealth and privilege but street smart enough to know that this is only a glimpse of the kind of life she could only dream of. But Vanya, it seems, is even more boyish and naive than he first appeared. He quickly begins to treat their relationship like a romance, she’s his girlfriend, even as he’s paying for her time. The story truly begins when Vanya offers to pay Ani to be with him for an entire week of partying, drugs, sex and a flight to Vegas that will change both of their lives in unexpected ways.

Sean Baker has a remarkable talent for getting to the heart of characters who are not typically seen in movies. His affinity and affection for those on the fringe of society and especially those on the lower end of the economic ladder makes him unique. In Hollywood features, poor people are usually defined by shabby production design and bad wigs. Sean Baker’s characters are defined by their humanity, their unique personalities, and the relatable desire to overcome their circumstances.

For Baker, there is no fetishization of suffering, no bowing and scraping at the altar of the nobility of being poor, working unforgiving jobs for little pay. Instead, Baker crafts stories around fully rounded characters who aren’t defined by their circumstances. They are uniquely themselves and our empathy for them arises because we get to know them, care about them, and root for them beyond the typical liberal guilt so many rich and powerful people mistake as empathy.

Similar to his approach to characters, Baker’s approach to storytelling is organic, it arises from the choices his characters make. In many mainstream movies you can sense the unseen hands pressing characters in the direction of the familiar plot. In a Sean Baker movie however, the plot arises as a result of cause and effect that feels authentic to the characters and their choices. Thus, when the story of Anora begins to take on a moderately surreal or merely absurd quality, it’s grounded by Baker’s ability to make it feel entirely hands off, as if the characters are acting on whims specific to who they are as people. Their choices make sense to them and by extension to us.

Baker co-directed a film in 2004 with Shih Ching Sou called Take Out. That wonderful film captured a day in the life of an illegal immigrant with a debt to pay and how he goes about raising the money. The main character pursues his goal by going to work and working twice as hard as he usually does, occasionally pausing for a cigarette and a conversation with a friend before getting back to the grind of delivering food. It’s easy to imagine the complications a mainstream movie would insert in this story but Baker’s focus is on this specific person and revealing him through his actions as a complex, thoughtful, sad but striving man of great determination.

Anora has a completely different story and tone but you can sense that it comes from the same filmmaker with the same open-hearted fascination with humanity of all kinds. Baker collects experiences and shares them in a fly on the wall fashion to give audiences a unique glimpse of a life not like their own but somehow achingly similar in its specificity. Anora is a rather classic notion of a movie that asks you what you would do if you were Anora while inviting you to observe how this wonderful character handles this strange situation.

Along the way, you can’t help but be drawn to Ani, even as she probably would not be interested in you beyond what you pay her for her time. She’s friendly and vivacious but she’s also guarded in the ways you would expect someone in her line of work to be. Thus it becomes so much more heartbreaking when money and dreams cause her to lower her guard. I won’t spoil the ending, you must see it for yourself. I will only say that it’s remarkably emotional in ways you won’t be able to anticipate. It’s rooted in Ani’s experiences, a life lived that we come to sense without having to see it fully played out in this movie.

That’s another amazing thing about Baker’s work, his ability to give his characters a fully fleshed out life with very little exposition. It’s exciting to realize you know these characters and you’ve only just met them. Their actions, the specific places they exist, create a sketch of a complete life that is lacking from so many mainstream movies. The recent Robert Zemeckis movie, Here, takes hours to give us years upon years of the story of a family and the home they occupied for decades. And by the end, we barely know those characters. Baker puts his characters in this scenario and how they react to it tells their story allowing them to layer in a complete life in a few brief sketches. It’s brilliant.

Anora is among the best movies of 2024. It’s human and funny and sad and occasionally absurd. It’s wildly adult with nudity and sexuality treated with the matter of fact quality of the daily life of a sex worker. Had Baker shied away from nudity and frank sexuality, it wouldn’t feel organic, it would feel too much like a movie made by people concerned about how the film will play to audiences in some mythical prudish midwestern city. The sex in Anora needs to be frank and explicit because that’s the nature of sex and the life of a sex worker. Not all movies need frank sexuality to tell a story but Anora does if we are to get a full picture of Ani’s life.

I love Anora. I love the work of Sean Baker and I am infatuated with the work of Mikey Madison. Anora is a brash and fiery debut performance that promises a huge career ahead of her. She’s just that good, she holds the center of Anora with the bravado of an actress well beyond her years. She’s brash and fearless and funny in a way that never tries to be funny. She’s just authentic, you can’t help but be drawn to her magnetism. And, when we get to that ending, she’s so far under our skin that we can’t help but ache with her as the story closes. Just remarkable.

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