‘Anora’ Had to End the Way It Does

The following article contains major spoilers for Anora, including its ending.

In Anora, there is no such thing as a Hollywood ending. An American sex worker marrying into a family of Russian oligarchs, and riding happily off into the sunset—are you stupid? For director Sean Baker, as the last scenes of Anora make clear, such fairytales are few and far between.

The brilliance of its opening 50 minutes, in which feisty stripper Ani (Mikey Madison) finds herself sucked into a whirlwind romance with spoiled, shabby-hot 20-something Vanya (Mark Eidelstein, whose striking cheekbones and cute curls have swiftly endeared him to cinephiles as the Russian Timothée Chalamet is that you are lulled into the naive sense that Ani might actually get her Cinderella story. The two meet at Ani's upmarket Manhattan strip club, and Vanya sticks out from the crowd as the only client visibly below 40. They hit it off, and he soon asks her for private show—and sex, mostly sex—at his lavish mansion in New York's Brighton Beach. Within a few days, he has paid her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week.

It's the sort of money that the industrious Ani can't turn down. The movie has a lot of fun with the ambiguous nature of their relationship: is it purely transactional, or is Vanya actually falling in love with Ani, and Ani with him? The lifestyle that Vanya offers is doubtlessly alluring, with drugs on tap, an incredible home, and private jet sojourns to Las Vegas. You'd forgive anyone for falling for such a fantasy, even if it's probably too good to be true. Such it how it comes to pass after Ani and Vanya get married on the Vegas trip, inspiring the wrath of Vanya's oligarch parents, humiliated by the rumors circulating in the motherland that their son has married a “hooker.”

When his parents' thugs arrive at Vanya's place to drag them to a courthouse and have their marriage forcedly annulled, Vanya abandons Ani and rushes off into the city; after a night of searching, they find him wasted at Ani's old club. Into the next morning, and even after his parents' arrival, Ani holds onto the hope that Vanya will stand up for their marriage. But he's a coward, an obnoxious brat, and bows to the pressure of his parents. (The truth is that he probably just exploited Ani in pursuit of his own fantasy that he, too, knew could never happen.)

And so Ani is dragged back to Vegas—in a comic twist, their nuptials can't actually be scratched off in New York State—to sign away the brilliant life that, for a second, seemed possible. But it was just as vivid, hypnotic and fake as the Sphere.

The ending, then, should be a pretty sad one: Ani is a likeable enough person, and you root for her to come away with something. (It helps that Madison is great in the part and will probably be in the running at the Oscars for it). Materially, there's some upside in the 10 grand payout she's promised by the family for agreeing to the divorce. But emotionally, and physically, she comes away from the experience battered and bruised. The only person on her side is Igor (Yura Borisov, as brilliant here as he was in the little-seen Finnish meet-cute movie Compartment No. 6), the gentle muscle who captured her in the first place. And it is sad, if not quite coming with the emotional payoff to justify the bold swing of Anora's final scenes.

Firstly, Ani and Igor spend a final evening together in Vanya's parents' mansion, before leaving when the banks open in the morning to collect Ani's annulment fee. They share a little conversation; Ani scoffs that he probably wanted to rape her, because he has “rape eyes,” but he wouldn't do it anyway, because he isn't man enough. Igor is bewildered. Then, the next morning, after they pull up at Ani's house, he produces the expensive wedding ring that Vanya had bought her. Another commiseration prize, sure, but one of two genuinely kind things that someone does for her in the entire movie, the other being when Igor stood up for her at the Vegas marriage office and insisted that Vanya apologize for what he put her through.

Her response is to climb on top of him, and they have quiet, emotionless sex. It's a strange twist that I read as Ani's attempt at reclaiming some sense of power; Ani uses sex to dominate men throughout Anora, be it the strip club clients she lures into spending hundreds of dollars on VIP lap dances, or indeed Vanya, who is ensnared by the fantasy she promises (until it all goes to shit). But when Igor tries to kiss her, she resists, before breaking down in tears, collapsing into his arms. Then the credits roll, accompanied solely by the sound of the car's windshield wipers. It's an abrasive ending that left me feeling emotionally short-changed in the immediate aftermath— walking out of my Sunday night screening, I overheard another audience member say something along the lines of, “The movie was great, but that ending was so awkward!” Which is true: it does feel awkward, and I'm sure that's the intent. But right up until the end, I had willed Anora to give its titular hero the W she deserved.

Well, she does get little wins along the way: Igor's empathy, the money, the wedding ring. Perhaps what Baker wants to challenge is our own naivety, and how movies have conditioned us to expect the romantic finale—even if we know that, in real life, it rarely happens like that. Does that excuse the fact that it leaves you feeling a little empty at the end? Perhaps it's just in the eye of the beholder. Madison described the ending as a “Rorschach test” in conversation with The A.V. Club: “I've heard so many different interpretations, from very cynical to very romantic,” she said. For his part, Baker has said that it's deliberately open to interpretation, while declining to offer his take (as filmmakers often do). But whether you love it or hate it, that Anora ends on such an abrasive note seems to be the point.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.