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Russian toughs are scary most of the time. You know the look: big muscles, hard stares, and often a faint suggestion that they’re connected to something while strutting around the boardwalks of Brighton Beach. In most American movies, this kind of typecasting is a visual shorthand for intimidation and menace.
But not in Anora, and not next to Mikey Madison. Five-foot nothing, petite, and buried beneath a forest of raven hair, Madison is dismissed as “just a little girl” by Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Eastern European middle manager who is attempting to put the fear of Ivan the Terrible into Madison’s twentysomething Canarsie girl. It doesn’t take. And the marvel of watching Sean Baker’s new oddball comedy is the dawning realization by both the audience and the hardknock cases in this battle of wills that their old country methods don’t stand a chance next to an immutable Brooklyn accent.
In a brava performance of intermittent rage and undaunted charisma, Madison electrifies the screen and dominates a premise that in other hands might be the beginning of a tense crime thriller. In hers, however, it is like watching a car wreck and the ensuing pile-up occur to the accompaniment of Benny Hill music (or at least a jaunty “That’s Amore”). Everyone in this movie is just along for the ride while the BK girl behind the wheel pushes the pedal further down, and her often manic smile yet further up.
It’s to deduce why Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last summer; it was still charming my own New York Film Festival audience five months later. The movie has rightly been credited as a star-making turn for an actress who once played Manson Girl Sadie Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (the one Brad Pitt said has the creepy “little white face”) and then the equally demented Ghostface killer in Scream 5. It would seem Anora writer-director Baker watched those unhinged performances and said “let’s build a laugher around that!” And in this comedy of errors, it will be a rich and powerful ensemble, who wouldn’t look out of place on an HBO prestige series, that slowly come to understand they’ve lost their center of gravity and are now forced to orbit around a pint-sized escort with a foul mouth and sometimes fouler attitude. Quickly scenes of attempted intimidation turn into begging for Madison’s Anora, or just “Ani,” to please get on the private jet.
But let’s step back before last-minute chartered flights to contextualize the rules of this madcap curio. Marketed, somewhat deceptively, as a love story, the film does begin with a romance of sorts: Ani is both an exotic dancer and escort working in deep Brooklyn when her rudimentary lessons in Russian (it helps with the nearby clientele) pays off. A high-roller with a big bank account and limited English wants an American girl to show him a good time. Nerdy, petulant, and visibly spoiled by a lifetime of coddling, young Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) is the son of Russian oligarchs of nondescript incomes. He also is taken with Ani’s joie de vivre and bubbliness, as much as she is wowed by his paying for her to spend the week in Las Vegas with him.
It might be the champagne and the bright lights, or just that she is the first woman who tells the little schmuck he’s bad at sex and needs to improve, but Ivan is smitten… and hey, they are in Vegas. So, of course, they get married. But when the newlyweds return to New York for a wintry seaside honeymoon in his parents’ house, things go sideways fast. It seems Mom and Dad saw that he changed his relationship status online, and while they’re back in Moscow, their henchmen are going to be sent in to get a quiet, easy annulment. But nothing is quiet and easy about the following two hours, save for the bonkers entertainment value.
A hero of the modern indie oddity that can feel both familiar and distinct from anything made before it, Baker is the same director who gave us Red Rocket in 2021 and The Florida Project in 2017. Anora is similarly stealthy in revealing just how humane and a sweet film it can be in spite of its obvious dalliances with the lurid and sensational. The movie toys with conventions of both the erotic thriller and obviously the gangster picture, but in its heart-of-hearts, it’s a screwball comedy with a twist.
This is exemplified in a scene of poor put-upon Toros—the most pathetic and downtrodden fixer I’ve seen in a movie—trying to get his minions to reason with Ani and explain why her marriage needs to end. A sequence that could be filled with dread instead has a surreal daffiness as the tiny Ani screams, kicks, and cajoles her oppressors into at least temporary submission. Later, when all of the same characters are wandering the boardwalks on a brisk January day, it is difficult to ascertain who is the leader as the power dynamics continue to blur.
Baker and his film walks beside them on the water’s edge between plausibility and crowd-pleasing silliness. The film succeeds because of the warmth exuded by Madison and a screenplay that finds joy in what is ultimately a pretty frigid setup. This is, after all, the story of a low-income call girl being purchased and misled by an immature nepo baby, and then spending most of the 140 minutes evading his powerful family’s brush off. Yet there is such empathy for most of the characters, including one chagrined sidekick Igor (Yura Borisov), who recognizes the sordidness of the situation, that the film achieves an unlikely innocence. It is at times as light as those lonely buoys floating off in the horizon.
That might be news to Ani, a young woman who’s brashness betrays a less than happy background and childhood, but Madison is so good at channeling her character’s natural performative instincts that the movie itself becomes a kind of magic trick, creating the illusion of zany wholesomeness out of a story, and a character, who is otherwise overcast by a perpetual gray skyline. The setting can be bleak, but the effect shimmers.
Anora premiered at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28 and opens in limited release on Oct. 18. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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