A Cinderella story for a modern age as a stripper turned rich wife must scour the streets of New York in an effort to find her husband and reaffirm her identity…

There are films, and then there are films that feel as though they were singularly made for you. Anora scratches the itch of everything I long for in a movie, a surprisingly earnest story of reclamation of personal identity through a skewed perception of love that blossoms into a wildly chaotic journey leaving room for any and all possibility in the turbulent odyssey.

Best described as Pretty Women meets Uncut Gems, Anora feels like watching pure joy of unadulterated frivolity only to then use its goodwill to rip the audience’s heart out in its final moments. Sean Baker’s capitalist critique weasels its way gradually underneath the overt insanity of its second act.

The script is brilliant in its subtlety, so distinct and casual in its promises that viewers may miss its nuance in the wake of its showier set pieces. Ani is a character tailor made for my sympathies, a woman so intrinsically tied to capitalistic exchanges by pure merit of her job title that she is resigned to wait patiently for the opportunity to reclaim her sense of personal identity.

When the opportunity is presented to become a wife in lieu of a sex worker, it feels like the means-to-an-end finally found its end. This is not to say the movie showcases disparaging views towards sex workers—quite the opposite in fact—but the film doesn’t hide its opinion on the monetary exchange of body and autonomy.

Throughout Ani’s 2nd act quest, a looney toons inspired odyssey that will likely make you burst into raucous laughter, the film is consistent in its insistence on Ani’s quest. Baker’s film breaks all conventions of filmic structure as it makes its own rules for pacing leaving a first time viewer wondering where they’re going to land.

But it is Mikey Madison’s star making performance at the film’s center that channels the chaotic, unpredictability that fuels this bizarre misadventure. Every scene in the film’s second act feels like a hilarious nightmare unfolding in increasingly unique ways as Ani struggles to adjust and readjust to circumstances leaving Mikey Madison as a performer fighting with increased clarity for her character to survive the unending setbacks.

The ensemble cast that builds around her is complete with a dazzling circle of stars-in-the-making, all with a brilliant aptitude for improvisation and comprehension of tone. Moments that could otherwise prove unremarkable—the grabbing of a baseball bat or making a toast on an airplane—invite the audience to celebrate them in their often hysterical reinterpretation or redeclaration of who these characters are.

Watching Yura Borisov’s calculation of Ani, seeing as each of these characters observe things about each other, becomes as integral to the viewing experience as the audience observing things themselves. Each piece of this cast unites so perfectly that the film feels like a treasure trove of moments catching one after another of these very real, earnest, flawed individuals chewing scenery and grounding this world in all of its glorious chaos.

There’s a moments towards the film’s final third (featuring a plane) in which Baker’s script, which is otherwise uniformly excellent, cannot seem to justify Ani’s decision to stay the course. But ultimately, this is not a fight for love. It’s a fight to be recognized—to be loved—in the face of a world that feels conditioned to only represent character through what they can offer.

This idea is so pervasive that it culminates in one of the most powerful endings of the year, a moment consistently misinterpreted by the online masses who miss entirely that the scene is predicated upon another exchange, the exchange of a ring. I think every great film, at its core, is about connection.

Connection to self, connection to others, connection to an audience, to a personal sense of identity, to a larger purpose, to a fading life, to a past, a present, a future. There’s a reason Anora is the title of the film despite the titular character’s continued insistence that she’d like to be called Ani.

We’re all fighting for our heads, every day, fighting against the persecution of our own inner turmoil in tandem with the persecution of a world that wants to relegate us to our ‘value’ and what we can ‘offer’. 

Anora is a marvel because it manages to say all of that amidst the constant uproarious hilarity of watching a group of buffoons galavanting through New York City in a desperate attempt to preserve their own self-worth. 9/10