Sean Baker’s Anora throws two worlds at each other so hard you can practically hear the impact. On one side, there’s Ani, played by Mikey Madison, moving through Brooklyn with the kind of speed and instinct that comes from knowing exactly how unstable life can get. On the other, there’s Vanya, the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, floating through New York like consequence is something that happens to other people.
That setup is the whole engine of the film: a working-class woman who understands value, labor, and risk colliding with a boy raised inside money so extreme it barely feels real. Sean Baker wrote and directed the film, which premiered at Cannes in May 2024 and later became a major awards player, including a Best Picture win at the 2025 Oscars.
What makes that collision so compelling is that Anora never treats class as a background detail. It’s the atmosphere of the movie. It’s in how people speak, how they move through rooms, how they assume they’ll be treated, and what they think can be fixed with cash. Ani and Vanya may enter the same fairy-tale fantasy for a minute, but they are not living in the same reality. Not even close.
The Movie Understands That Money Creates Its Own Language
One of the smartest things Anora does is show wealth as a kind of private dialect. Vanya doesn’t simply have money. He has the sort of money that bends rules, erases inconvenience, and turns every whim into a plan. His life runs on insulation. If he wants something, someone else handles the mess.
Ani comes from the opposite direction. She understands hustle, performance, and survival in a way Vanya never will. That doesn’t mean she’s naive. Quite the opposite. She reads people quickly because she has to. She knows when someone’s playing rich-guy fantasy, and she knows how desire and status work together in transactional spaces.
Brooklyn Feels Real Because Ani Does
A lot of films flatten working-class characters into symbols of authenticity. Anora is sharper than that. Ani is funny, tough, impulsive, guarded, and occasionally reckless. She isn’t there to be a moral lesson about class inequality, and thank God for that. She feels like a person first.
Mikey Madison gives her a restless energy that carries the whole film. Ani is always calculating, adjusting, deciding whether this moment is worth trusting. Even when she gets swept up in the fantasy, there’s a practical intelligence underneath it.
That’s where the Brooklyn side of the story matters. Baker has always been interested in people living close to the edge, and Anora keeps that instinct. Ani’s world has texture. It has work in it. It has friction.
The Russian Elite Are Powerful, but They’re Also Ridiculous
The film gets a lot of mileage out of showing how absurd the oligarch world really is. These people arrive with money, muscle, entitlement, and the absolute belief that reality should rearrange itself around them. They are threatening, yes, but they’re also often pathetic in a very specific rich-person way. They’re used to control, and when they lose it, they don’t become graceful. They become frantic.
That tonal balance matters. Anora isn’t a solemn class lecture. It’s often chaotic, funny, and uncomfortable all at once. The people surrounding Vanya, including the hired fixers and family enforcers, bring in a whole different energy. Suddenly the movie becomes part romantic delusion, part social farce, part panic spiral through New York.
General plot descriptions describe that turn as a chase to undo Ani and Vanya’s impulsive marriage once his family gets involved, and that shift is exactly where the class conflict stops being abstract and becomes brutally personal.
And honestly, that’s why the film works so well. The oligarch machine is scary because it’s powerful, but it’s also deeply childish. It cannot imagine a world where its authority doesn’t win.
The Fairy Tale Was Always Built to Crack
People have described Anora as a modern Cinderella story, and sure, on the surface that tracks. A young woman gets swept into luxury through a reckless romance with a rich heir. The dress is there. The fantasy is there. The sudden change in status is there.
But Baker isn’t interested in preserving the fairy tale. He’s interested in stress-testing it. What happens when the prince is useless and the palace is full of people who see you as disposable? What happens when the dream is funded by old power and protected by intimidation?
That’s where the cultural collision hits hardest. Ani doesn’t meet a better life. She meets a different power structure. The Russian oligarch world isn’t merely wealthier than hers. It operates by an entirely different moral logic. Image matters more than feeling. Control matters more than love. Family power matters more than individual choice. Ani’s Brooklyn hustle may be messy, but it’s at least connected to effort and consequence. The oligarch world floats above both until something threatens its image.
Ani Sees the Truth Before Everyone Else Wants to Admit It
What makes Anora stick with you is that Ani becomes the clearest-eyed person in the room. Not because she has the most power, but because she understands what power does to people. She sees the performance and the weakness hiding inside the swagger. She sees that wealth can make men look invincible right up until they have to act like adults.
That doesn’t make her invulnerable. The film never turns her into some untouchable icon of grit. She gets hurt and misjudges things. She wants things that may not be possible. That’s part of what makes the performance land. Ani is strong, but she’s not a slogan.
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.