Review-Anora

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I’ve been hearing people rave about Anora for weeks and finally grabbed a ticket to see it recently. I was not disappointed by what director Sean Baker produced in his incredible look into the world of a New York City sex worker who goes on a twisted Cinderella story.

Mikey Madison delivers a powerhouse performance as Ani (Anora) and rules the screen in every scene.

From the beginning, Anora shows us a world that many people may only encounter on the big screen. We meet Ani (Mikey Madison) at her job as an exotic dancer in a New York City club. The scenes are lurid and this feels like Pretty Woman turned up to the max. Money and booze flow freely and when Ani is tasked with taking care of a young Russian man at the club because of her familiarity with the language, her life changes forever.

That man (man-child really) is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), or Vanya as she calls him, and when he asks for her private services at his home, he quickly falls in love with her and invites her to Las Vegas with his friends for a get away. Vanya is the spoiled son of a Russian billionaire lounging in his father’s house in New York and playing rich boy. He asks Ani to marry him while in Vegas and she moves into his mansion where they play house…until mommy and daddy find out.

But this film is NOT Pretty Woman and Ani’s Cinderella story is not made for Disney. All of which is to say that this is an entirely different type of film once it hits the halfway point. The entire time, I was kept on the edge of my seat, trying to get in the heads of the various characters and figure out their motivations. Once the cat’s out of the bag about the marriage, we meet Toros (Karren Karagulian), Vanya’s handler in New York, and his henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) who are diamonds in the rough. None of these names were familiar to me before the film, but they take Sean Baker’s script and live it, even in the most ridiculous moments.