Sean Baker has spent two decades filming people who work jobs the movies usually ignore, and Anora is the loudest, funniest version of that project so far. Mikey Madison plays Ani with a Brighton Beach snap in every line reading, funny and furious and scared, often in the same breath. The first forty minutes move like a Vegas fairy tale shot on a strip-club budget — impulsive proposal, drive-through wedding chapel, a mansion full of vodka. Baker lets that high last just long enough to hurt when it ends.
The turn, when it comes, arrives as three men in cheap suits sent by the in-laws to undo the marriage before the parents land. What follows is closer to a farce than a thriller, a long night of hostages who can't agree on who's holding whom, and the film's best stretch belongs to Yura Borisov as the fixer who starts as muscle and ends up the only person paying attention to what Ani actually wants. The comedy is loose and physical, doors slamming, phones ringing at the worst moments, but it never loses track of how much is actually at stake for the woman at the center of it.
A Cinderella story that clocks its own fairy tale and keeps going anyway.
What makes Anora more than a very well-executed bit is the last ten minutes, which swap out the farce for something quieter and much sadder without changing tone or raising its voice. Baker doesn't editorialize about Ani's line of work or her choices; he just keeps the camera on her a beat longer than comfort allows. It's the rare movie about a wedding that ends up being about the difference between being rescued and being seen.
Anora was written, directed, produced, and edited by Sean Baker, continuing his run of films built around sex work and the American service economy, following Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. It was made for roughly $6 million and shot largely in and around Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with Mikey Madison spending months developing Ani's accent and dance-club choreography before filming began. The supporting cast leans on Russian and Armenian actors, including Yura Borisov and Karren Karagulian, a recurring Baker collaborator since Tangerine. Neon acquired the film ahead of its Cannes premiere and released it in North American theaters on October 18, 2024.
Anora premiered in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, extending Neon's streak to five consecutive Palme d'Or winners after Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, and Anatomy of a Fall. It went on to win five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Madison, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing, sweeping most of the categories it was nominated in. On a $6 million budget it grossed nearly $60 million worldwide, making it Baker's highest-grossing film by a wide margin and cementing his move from festival-circuit favorite to mainstream awards contender.
Madison's performance took months of specific physical preparation rather than a few weeks of coaching: she trained under pole-dance coordinator Kennady Schneider roughly two days a week for three months, working through pole choreography, lap-dance technique, and club-floor stagecraft so that Ani's job reads as muscle memory rather than performance. That commitment to specificity carried into the film's larger politics, too. When Baker took the stage for his Best Original Screenplay win at the Oscars, he used part of the speech to directly thank the sex worker community for sharing their stories and life experiences with him over the years, tying the film's acclaim explicitly back to the people whose work it depicts rather than treating the subject as just colorful backdrop.
