The real nightmare in Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ isn’t what you expect

On paper, plenty about the premise of Sean Baker’s Anora suggests the high possibility that a vexing nightmare is about to unfold. Ani, played with verve and vulnerability by Mikey Madison, is a sex worker living in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach. At the Manhattan strip club where she dances she meets Ivan, who goes by Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), an impish, spoiled son of Russian oligarchs. They begin a relationship that’s at first purely transactional, but rapidly escalates into an intense, mutual infatuation between horny, impulsive 20-somethings.

After just a few days, they have a quickie Vegas wedding – no pre-nup – and word gets back to Vanya’s parents back in Russia, who definitely won’t stand for their goofy son bringing “shame” upon the family by marrying a “prostitute.” They deploy his handler Toros (Karren Karagulian) to ensure the marriage is annulled; Toros in turn enlists a couple of burly henchmen to wrangle the couple and get them down to the courthouse. Ani and Vanya resist, to the deep irritation of everyone else involved.

Being a pop culture enthusiast who’s consumed an untold number of gritty American thrillers from the ‘80s and ‘90s and an embarrassingly incalculable number of hours of Law & Order: SVU, I’ve become accustomed to expecting the bleakest while hoping for the best when encountering any of Anora’s elements on screen – sex workers, Russian oligarchs, whirlwind Vegas marriages, etc. Things don’t usually end well when these factors are at play. This is true especially for the sex workers, who historically have been subjected to voyeuristic condescension and violent fates, sometimes as vessels for moralizing cautionary tales. Like, say, most of the women in Sin City, or the daughter of Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) in Hardcore.

And so, when henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov) showed up on Vanya’s doorstep in Anora, I kept waiting for the other Pleaser heel to drop, worriedly anticipating that Ani’s scrappy and expletive-laden reactions to the sudden implosion of her newly-wedded bliss would get her seriously hurt, or worse. But it never plays out like that.

Toros and his underlings are more nettled security guard types than they are by-any-means-necessary brutes; they at first respond to her outbursts as though she were a belligerent drunk trying to get inside the club, calm but insistent that she’ll never be a part of this family.

After several minutes, it becomes clear they don’t want to physically harm her – amazingly for a movie made in 2024, no gun is ever wielded, even as a threat. But they do have a job to do, and Baker finds After Hours-like comedic chaos in their exasperated attempts to coerce Ani to do as they say with the least amount of force, and in their search for Vanya all over Brighton Beach after he runs off.

Mikey Madison as Ani.

Neon

hide caption

toggle caption

Neon

Baker’s been carving out an auteurist’s legacy for years now, crafting quietly political stories by deliberately avoiding sensationalizing people and communities living on the margins. In Starlet, an ascendant young porn actress in Los Angeles forges a sweet friendship with a lonely elderly woman. The lo-fi Tangerine is a poignant day-in-the-life dramedy about a pair of transgender sex workers and friends. Red Rocket, his last film before Anora, is about Mikey, a faded porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown in an attempt to regroup and eventually find his way back into the industry. If there’s any stigma to be found in these films, it comes from characters within the narrative, as when Mikey gets turned down for jobs because of his adult film past.

Anora fits squarely in Baker’s oeuvre, and part of what makes it special is its laser-like focus on prioritizing character-building over communicating a “message.” Even so, no movie exists in a vacuum, and no viewer comes to a movie without bringing their entire being – memories, biases, experiences – with them. Baker’s disarmingly lighthearted and non-judgmental perspective lands in a different time than Starlet did in 2012, or Red Rocket did just three years ago. Sex work has moved ever so slightly from the fringes into the mainstream – OnlyFans is a household name now, for one – and some within the profession have even seen advances in legal rights and protections, though not without challenges.

Still, the same judgmental attitudes Vanya’s parents cast upon Ani persist in real life — most recently, for example, in social media chatter following the accusations and criminal charges against Sean “Diddy” Combs. And sex work continues to be demonized and sometimes all-too-easily conflated with industries like human trafficking, which has become one of the foremost moral panics currently preoccupying the religious right and conspiracy theorists – see: Pizzagate, and the 2023 hagiographic box office hit Sound of Freedom starring prominent QAnon supporter Jim Caviezel.

If you know nothing of Anora going into it, is it even possible to watch without wondering how it might try to channel the fever-pitched fantasies of a Death Wish or Hardcore, drawing explicitly upon the anxieties of the moment?

Baker seems to have anticipated certain genre expectations, as well as the realities of violence’s pervasiveness: After the marriage is officially kaput and pitiful Vanya’s on his way back to Russia with his parents, Ani asks Igor suspiciously why he didn’t try to rape her; she seems almost offended by his passiveness. It’s a fraught question that hints at the real dangers she faces daily in her profession and as a woman, and perhaps, some past trauma the audience never learns of.

[The following paragraphs contain plot details for Anora. Stop here if you haven’t seen the film yet and want to avoid spoilers.]

The last stretch of Anora, including a brilliantly ambiguous final scene, is about as heavy as it gets. At its core it’s a romantic dramedy that’s gotten a lot of comparisons to Pretty Woman, though it seems even more spiritually akin to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (the basis for the American musical Sweet Charity), about a sex worker and hopeless romantic in Rome who keeps picking the worst kind of men to get attached to. That film is bookended by two separate occurrences in which a would-be paramour attempts to kill Cabiria in order to steal her money.

Anora’s Vanya isn’t violent toward Ani in the slightest. And at least at first, he seems genuinely into her and the romanticized idea of her, in that hormonal, completely irrational and fleeting kind of way middle-schoolers crush on one another. But he is a spineless man-child living off his parents’ wealth and wholly incapable of forming deep connection with anything other than his vape pen and video game console. And he’s completely conflict-avoidant: He lets his parents find out about Ani and the marriage through the rumor mill, and runs away like the scamp he is once he has to face the consequences, leaving a mortified Ani to fend for herself. She wants desperately to save this relationship, but he’s giving her absolutely nothing to work with.

Perhaps Anora really is a nightmare in its own very specific way. The horror isn’t sexual violence, however – it’s the obfuscating naivete of immaturity. Like Cabiria, Ani’s journey is that of a woman pouring her hopes and dreams into a guy, only to come to the slow realization he’s a pathetic disappointment. She thought he was a man, but he was just a little boy. Honestly, it’s so relatable.