Sean Baker has always understood that place can do more than decorate a movie. In Anora, New York is not some postcard backdrop sitting politely behind the actors. It pushes the story forward, shapes the mood, sharpens the class tension, and keeps reminding us what kind of fairy tale this really is.
That matters because Anora begins like a dream. Ani, played by Mikey Madison, meets Ivan, or Vanya, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, and for a little while the movie lets that dream breathe. But Baker sets that dream in a version of New York that feels textured, specific, and stubbornly real. That choice changes everything.
Ani is not floating through a glamorous movie city. She works, hustles, negotiates, watches people carefully, and knows exactly how quickly a good night can turn bad. New York in Anora reflects that same alertness. It is busy, noisy, messy, seductive, and unforgiving all at once. The film could have told this story anywhere, technically speaking. But it would not have landed the same way anywhere else.
Brighton Beach Gives the Film Its Soul
The most important location in Anora is Brighton Beach, and Baker clearly knows it. He does not treat the neighborhood like a trendy secret for outsiders to admire from a distance. He films it as a lived-in world with its own rhythms, businesses, language, and social codes.
That matters because Ani belongs to that environment, even when she seems to be pushing against it. Brighton Beach gives the film a very particular energy. It is not the polished Manhattan of luxury storefronts and clean fantasy. It feels older, denser, more local, more tied to immigrant history and working-class survival.
In story terms, that makes Ani’s Cinderella-style leap feel more dramatic. She is not being lifted out of a vague struggle. She is stepping out of a concrete, recognizable world. We see where she comes from, and that makes the promise of escape feel both thrilling and fragile.
Baker Uses Geography to Tell the Truth
One of the smartest things about Anora is how carefully it moves through New York. Baker has always been good at making neighborhoods feel like emotional maps, and here he uses geography almost like character development.
The film starts in Manhattan spaces tied to performance, money, and transaction. That fits Ani’s job and the version of herself she has to sell. Then the movie shifts into South Brooklyn, especially Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and the more residential zones connected to Vanya’s family money. Those shifts are not random. Each area carries a different social temperature.
Manhattan feels fast and artificial, a place where fantasy can be rented by the hour. Brighton Beach feels more rooted and watchful. The richer residential areas around Vanya’s life feel removed, protected, and insulated by money. Las Vegas, briefly, is the ultimate pressure cooker fantasy, bright and reckless enough to make bad decisions look romantic.
By the time the film starts chasing Vanya across the city, the movement itself becomes part of the point. Ani is no longer being swept into a dream. She is being dragged through the machinery behind it.
This New York Feels Lived In, Not Cleaned Up
A lot of films say they are set in New York when they really mean a carefully cropped version of New York. Baker is after something else. He likes storefronts with history, neighborhoods with specific cultural textures, and streets that feel like people actually use them. You can feel that in Anora almost scene by scene.
That realism gives the movie its tension. When the story gets funnier, the city keeps it from floating away. When the story gets darker, the city keeps it from turning abstract. Brighton Beach boardwalks, restaurants, candy shops, apartment buildings, and side streets all add up to a version of New York that feels slightly rough around the edges in the best way. It has personality. It has friction.
That friction is crucial in a Sean Baker film. He is not interested in creating a fantasy that seals itself off from the world. He wants the world pressing in from all sides. In Anora, that means the setting keeps interrupting the illusion of wealth and romance. Even when the movie is funny, New York is there saying: yes, but look closer.
Class Looks Different Depending on the Block
The film’s setting also makes its class politics much sharper. Anora is, among other things, a story about what money can buy and what it absolutely cannot. New York is the perfect city for that because wealth and precarity can sit absurdly close to each other.
Ani knows how to move through transactional spaces. Vanya moves through them like a kid who has never been told no. That gap is funny at first, then revealing, then painful. Baker uses the city to show us that gap without needing long speeches about it.
The City Keeps the Fairy Tale Honest
What makes Anora so effective is that Baker understands the seduction of fairy tales and their cruelty. The New York setting helps him hold both ideas at once. This city can absolutely sell you a fantasy. Reinvention, desire, money, access, spectacle. New York is built for that. But it is also a city that exposes bluffing very quickly.
That is why the setting matters so much. If Anora took place in a more generic movie world, the rise-and-fall structure would feel thinner. In New York, especially this New York, the dream always comes with a shadow attached to it. The city is thrilling, but it is also full of hard edges. Baker never lets us forget that.
Mikey Madison’s performance benefits from that tension too. Ani makes sense in these streets. Her toughness, humor, adaptability, and flashes of vulnerability all feel connected to the environment around her. She is not a stock character wandering through a concept. She feels like someone shaped by a particular city, a particular neighborhood, and a particular set of economic realities.
Anora works so well because Baker does not separate character from place. He knows that Ani’s story hits harder when New York is allowed to be specific, funny, bruised, and alive. Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Manhattan, and all the space between them give the film its pulse. Without that version of New York, Anora would still have a plot. It would not have the same ache.
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.