Anora ending spoilers follow.
After the whirlwind Cinderella story of Anora’s first half goes awry with the screwball comedy of its second, the film's quietly dark ending seems to come out of nowhere. But in a film that takes every opportunity to subvert expectations, the emotional final note feels like the only ending that could make sense.
Anora sees firecracker sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) meet her soon-to-be short-lived husband Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) one night while working at a strip club on Brighton Beach. The son of a murky Russian oligarch, Vanya whiles his lavish days away, on his dad's dime, with booze and Call of Duty.
The pair initially strike a Pretty Woman-style bargain to spend the week together, which escalates to a quick trip down the aisle during a bender in Las Vegas. Once Vanya's family get wind of the marriage, Toros (played by longtime Sean Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian) and his muscle pitch up and the fairytale crumbles into a slapstick farce of Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.
Among the dim-witted henchmen who descend on Vanya's manchild mansion is Igor (Yura Borisov – who director Baker described as "the Ryan Gosling of Russia"), a timid Kronk kind of figure who starts to fall in love with Ani all while violently detaining her.
Before the idea of a stripper whisked away by a goofy rich kid ever came to mind, Baker thought his next film would be a Russian gangster movie. Those initial seeds take shape with Vanya's Three Stooges handlers.
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We're primed for a certain amount of violence from films with organised crime involving Russians, so once they pitch up there's an expectation Anora will take a darker turn. At this point the disarming Vanya runs off hoisting his trousers up, leaving Ani to fight off Igor and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), doing intense damage to the latter's nasal passage.
But despite the scene ratcheting up and up, nothing significantly terrible happens – there's a less well-done version of this that ends with Ani dead. Instead, their incompetence is reassuring and paves the way for another surprising shift in the story.
As they trail the Coney Island boardwalk in search of Vanya's jet-black aviators, Igor's meaningful looks at Ani hint another romance is brewing.
By the time Igor shows Ani he nabbed her engagement ring back, surrounded by a blizzard of New York snow and soundtracked to his grandmother's creaky windscreen wiper, they have a shared understanding. Both live at the whims of the rich.
Ani then initiates sex with Igor, but when he pulls her in for a kiss, her tough-spirited shell cracks and she collapses into tears. It's as if the weight of the hellish last couple of days whack down all at once.
There's sex that is and is not transactional in the film – this final scene treads the line between the two, since Igor seems to want the former, while Ani the latter.
Yet the moment is also crucially not linked to Ani's sex work, something which Baker has put destigmatising at the centre of his films. The early strip club scenes are injected with a sense of Take That-soundtracked fun, instead of their well-worn depiction as seedy and demeaning places.
In that setting, Ani is savvy. But as she leaves HQ, she shares her dreams of a Disneyland honeymoon and sincerely believes she's found a way out.
The arrival of Vanya's frightening mother – apron strings still attached – builds to the realisation of a system stacked against the working class. It's not the first film to point to the US's misnomer as the 'Land of Opportunity', but it does so with a winning quality and an empathy for the class positions of its henchmen and sex workers alike.
The reality of Ani's dashed hopes finally hits, as the financial chance slips away and her performance of control comes crashing down.
Once again, Anora defies expectations, refusing to give the cheap uplift of a triumphant final note. Another film might have had Ani get the guy or win out against the Russian money, as she briefly tells Vanya's mother she might be able to.
For a film that keeps you guessing, it's a fitting conclusion. The moment is so open-ended Baker wrote an epilogue for the actors' eyes only. But would we really want the easy answer of what comes next?
Instead, after two hours of propulsive momentum, the fact of this melancholy and somewhat underwhelming coda gives us a crack of insight into Ani's own feelings of having such monumental hopes dashed.
Anora is out in US and UK cinemas now.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
