Anora Review: A Screwball Fairy Tale That Curdles Into Heartbreak

The genre bait-and-switch

Sean Baker structures Anora as a trap. The first act plays as intoxicating wish-fulfilment — a Brooklyn sex worker sweeps into a Russian oligarch’s son’s orbit, and the film gives us the champagne-and-Vegas montage the fantasy demands. Then the family’s henchmen arrive, and the movie pivots into farce, chase and finally a devastating quiet. The pleasure of the setup is precisely what makes the reckoning land.

Comedy as engine

Baker directs the middle stretch as pure screwball — a single chaotic night of thugs, misunderstandings and slammed doors, staged with the kinetic timing of the great door-farces. But the laughter is never idle. Every gag tightens the vice, and the film’s velocity keeps us from noticing how completely it has shifted from romance to something closer to grief.

Mikey Madison’s revelation

The film belongs to Mikey Madison, whose Ani is all armour and appetite until the closing minutes strip her bare. It is a performance of enormous physical confidence that ends on the smallest, most devastating gesture — a breakdown of the self-protection the whole film has watched her build. She earns the final scene, one of the great endings in recent American cinema.

Baker’s abiding subject

As in all his work, Baker refuses to condescend to people the culture discards. Anora is furious about class — about who is permitted to marry up, who is disposable to the powerful — but it locates that fury in specific, funny, contradictory human beings rather than theses. Its politics are inseparable from its warmth.

Verdict

Anora is a triumph — hilarious, humane and quietly shattering, a fairy tale that knows exactly whose dreams the world is built to crush. Sean Baker’s masterpiece and one of the decade’s essential films.