i truly wanted to love this, it’s entertaining enough, but there’s some key issues preventing me from being on board with this, namely how little we know about anora at all. 

mikey madison is incredible and gives such a sympathetic performance capturing all of Ani’s feistiness and vulnerability, but it can’t make up for the fact that we as an audience have no idea what her motivations are and thus it affects the framing of the story. there’s little details sprinkled in - like the fact she wants her honeymoon to be at disney world shows us she is a hopeless romantic. so it’s very clear she’s not in this only for money, but how desperate is she? what is really driving her? does she actually think they’re in love? we’re left to fill in a lot of blanks and just make assumptions.

it makes the ending feel unearned in that it introduces an inner conflict in the last minute of the movie that wasn’t explored the entire runtime. it doesn’t re-contextualize the movie so much as it brings up a ton of questions regarding anora’s personal relationship to sex and how her occupation may or may not have affected her romantic relationships throughout her life. if sean baker’s films are about de-stigmatizing sex work to show that sex work is just like any other sort of job, it’s a big move to all of a sudden suggest it warps a person’s view of intimacy right at the end of the film, without exploring that persons past and why that might be. 

in order for this film to work and have emotional resonance, it’s very reliant on you buying into the ‘fairytale’ of ani’s romance and then having a laugh along the way in order to ‘slap’ you with reality at the end. but i was staring reality in the face the whole time. when did this ever feel like a fairytale?? their relationship was always quite transactional, with ani having to teach and almost baby him. so there wasnt much of a fairytale to break. 

tonally, i’ve seen this likened to a screwball comedy and i think this is where sean baker’s hyper realism in his filmmaking style was bumping up against the attempts at humor. i’ve never felt more cognitive dissonance in my life than being horrified at seeing a woman held down and tied up and an entire theater laughing?? if this was a true broad comedy and we knew nothing bad would happen to her then sure maybe i would laugh at some of the gags, but in this context i just felt truly scared for this woman. 

by the end i just wasn’t sure what this was trying to say. not every movie needs to be a “message” film, but with lackluster character development and a journey i didn’t find particularly humorous, i don’t have much to leave with except to ire mikey madison as a leading lady. but maybe that’s enough.