Sean Baker’s Anora walks into the room wearing rom-com clothes, then quietly starts setting fire to the outfit. On paper, the setup sounds almost suspiciously familiar. A young woman from Brooklyn meets a rich, reckless heir, gets swept into a fantasy of money and attention, and suddenly finds herself living out something that looks a lot like a modern Cinderella story. That is the bait. The movie knows you’ve seen versions of that story before, and it uses that recognition against you.
Mikey Madison plays Anora, who goes by Ani, a Brooklyn sex worker who meets Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, the son of a Russian oligarch. They impulsively marry in Las Vegas, and the fantasy starts to crack almost as soon as it begins, especially once his family hears the news and moves to shut the whole thing down. That plot engine is important because it sounds like romance, but it runs on money, power, class, and panic.
It Starts Like a Fantasy on Purpose
What makes Anora so sharp is that it understands the grammar of the rom-com. There is the intoxicating early rush, the whirlwind attention, the feeling that one person has suddenly opened a hidden door into a brighter, shinier life. Ani gets the makeover treatment in a less literal sense.
That matters because the movie is not mocking Ani for wanting the fantasy. It would be a much weaker film if it stood at a distance and rolled its eyes. Instead, it lets the fantasy breathe long enough for us to understand its appeal. Of course she wants to believe in it. Who wouldn’t? A rom-com works by making desire feel plausible for two hours. Anora uses that same mechanism, but with a much harsher understanding of what money can do to people and what happens when one person in a relationship can treat the whole thing like a game.
Vanya Is the Anti Rom-Com Hero
If Anora has a prince charming figure, he is a pretty pathetic one. Vanya is not a grand romantic lead in disguise. He is a rich kid with terrible impulse control, a weak spine, and the emotional maturity of someone who has never had to live with consequences. Rom-coms usually ask us to believe the messy guy underneath the charm is secretly decent. Anora asks a nastier question: what if the charm is the problem?
That shift changes everything. In a standard romantic comedy, the male lead eventually proves he is serious. He grows up, shows up, and earns the happy ending. Vanya does the opposite. The more pressure he faces, the more he shrinks. The movie exposes the gap between being desired and being valued, and that is one of its most cutting ideas. Ani may be central to Vanya’s fantasy, but that does not mean she is central to his conscience.
The Comedy Gets More Frantic and Less Comforting
Another reason the film feels so sly is the way it uses comedy. Baker has described it as a screwball dramedy, and you can feel that rhythm in the film’s momentum once the marriage becomes a crisis. Characters like Igor, played by Yura Borisov, and Toros, played by Karren Karagulian, help turn the second half into something chaotic, funny, and deeply stressful at the same time. The laughs are real, but they do not offer the usual rom-com comfort. They tighten the screws.
That is a huge reversal of genre expectation. In most rom-coms, comedy softens conflict. Here, comedy makes conflict feel more humiliating, more absurd, and somehow more revealing. People keep moving, yelling, chasing, negotiating. The energy is funny until it suddenly is not. Baker has always been interested in the gap between how people sell a dream and how life actually feels on the ground, and Anora turns that tension into its whole emotional engine.
Ani Is Treated Like a Person, Not a Lesson
One of the film’s smartest choices is that it refuses to flatten Ani into a symbol. She is not a quirky rom-com heroine, and she is not a tragic cautionary tale either. She is funny, proud, impulsive, defensive, hopeful, and often sharper than the people around her. Baker dedicated his Cannes win to sex workers, which fits the way the film pushes back against easy moral judgment. Ani is not there to be rescued so the audience can feel noble about it. She is there to be seen.
Mikey Madison is a huge reason the film works. Her performance gives Ani a restless intelligence that keeps the movie from turning into a thesis statement. You can feel her reading every room, recalculating every power shift, trying to decide when to push and when to protect herself. That is why the film lands harder than a simple genre inversion. It is not only playing with rom-com mechanics. It is watching a woman realize, in real time, how flimsy those mechanics look when real power enters the scene. Madison’s performance ultimately carried her all the way to an Oscar win for Best Actress.
The Ending Refuses the Usual Reward
Rom-coms are built around emotional reassurance. Even when they get messy, they usually return to order. Anora is interested in what happens after the illusion collapses, when there is no big speech available to clean up the damage. That is where the film becomes something deeper than a clever anti-rom-com. It stops being about a genre trick and starts being about the cost of confusion, humiliation, and false hope.
What lingers is not some smug message about love being fake. The movie is much sadder and more humane than that. It suggests that the fantasy can feel real even when it is built on uneven ground. It suggests that class can distort intimacy beyond recognition. And it suggests that the stories we are taught to call romantic can look very different from the point of view of the person with less power. That is the real reversal at the heart of Anora. It takes a genre built on wish fulfillment and asks what the wish is actually worth.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.