From the jaundiced fringes of Florida motels to the sun-blasted pink purgatory of Texas strip donut shops, Sean Baker has built his cinematic universe on the margins. In Anora, his latest and perhaps most audacious film, he trades the pastel poverty of The Florida Project and the gonzo verité of Tangerine for something more opulent, yet no less precarious: the story of a Russian oligarch’s wayward son and the sex worker he impulsively marries.
Baker has always been a cartographer of unlikely love stories, and in Anora, he drafts his map with a reckless, neon-lit pen. Structured in three distinct acts, each tonally and stylistically divergent but seamlessly stitched together—the film is a phantasmagoric odyssey through money, desire, and delusion.
We begin in the glittering half-world of high-end stripping, where we meet Anora (played with thunderous charisma by Mikey Madison), a dancer fluent in Russian and fluent, too, in the transactional grammar of intimacy. She captures the attention of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a gauche 21-year-old heir to untold billions and perhaps the most emotionally bankrupt trust fund romantic since The Great Gatsby. Their courtship unfolds in a flurry of caviar-dusted nights, smoke-hazed bedrooms, and absurdly expensive whimsy, climaxing in a shotgun Vegas wedding that feels less like a union and more like a dare.
Then the film changes. Act Two barrels forward with the speed and nervous energy of a defibrillator shock. When Vanya’s handlers catch wind of the nuptials and alert his exiled royal-family-as-boardroom-oligarch parents, the dream curdles into a chase. Anora and the family’s hired muscle tear through a wintry New Jersey in search of the runaway groom. Think Uncut Gems, but with fur coats, Eastern European swearing, and a surprisingly effective use of EDM as tension-building device.
The third act descends, there is no better word for it, into tragedy. The parents arrive, sweeping in with the cold, clinical wrath of people who have never been told “no.” What was once a romance dissolves in the acid bath of wealth, power, and the enduring global tradition of familial control masquerading as love. Vanya reveals himself as feckless and spineless, and Anora, betrayed and brutalized, is left to reckon with the ruin of her fairy tale.
But this is not a morality tale. Baker never moralizes. Anora is about yearning; the sort that money can amplify but never satisfy. It’s also about performance: the one Madison delivers with astonishing range and dexterity, and the one Anora herself performs daily, toggling between persona and person, vulnerability and command. It is, quite simply, one of the most magnetic performances in recent American cinema: raw, flamboyant, devastating.
Baker’s camera is as restless as ever, pirouetting through strip clubs, gliding across casino floors, skimming across icy Jersey streets with a near-lyrical sense of momentum. The film’s visual style, both frenetic and impressionistic, finds beauty in unlikely corners: a gas station at midnight, the glow of a rideshare car’s interior, a torn cocktail dress catching the morning light. And then there is the humor, pitch-black and expertly deployed. Baker mines the absurdity of wealth with surgical precision, never letting the audience forget that these lives, for all their extravagance, are just as brittle as the dollar that fuels them.
Anora is not just a film. It is a dare, a hallucination, a scream in three parts. It may very well be the first great American film of 2024; wildly entertaining, emotionally pulverizing, and, yes, holy shit-level good. In a landscape of prestige cinema that too often mistakes solemnity for depth, Anora dares to be kinetic, funny, vulgar, romantic, and tragic all at once. It doesn’t just ask for your attention, it grabs you by the collar and demands it. Baker has made his masterpiece. And Mikey Madison? She’s incandescent.
