Anora is a 2024 romantic comedy-drama film, written, directed, produced, and edited by Sean Baker. The film, set in the present day in Brooklyn, USA, immediately gained in popularity and won five 2025 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Editing and Best original screenplay.
The story revolves around the main heroine Anora, who is due to life circumstances forced to work in a pleasure house, where she meets Vanya, the 21-year-old son of the Russian oligarch. The plot is pretty clichéd. Vanya, as a typical party-goer, hires Anora, they spend some time together, and then the main heroine expectedly fells in love. However, she obviously encounters difficulties in the form of Vanya’s parents. The resulting situation is simultaneously unsurprising but unexpected, you can only understand it when you see.
The film has several strengths. First of all, there are numerous riveting spectacular scenes, that are actually well-crafted. In addition, some people find it rather though-provoking and raising nowadays social issues. Nevertheless, it must be mentioned that the second part is quite slow-moving and, as there were two languages used, the translation and dubbing into other languages are rather dissapointing.
In conclusion, not only did Anora gained a lot of praise, but also received pretty much critisism, meaning that every person has their own perception of this story. Interestingly, we cannot clearly divide viewers into two categories, there are also people who both love and hate this story, including me. Therefore, I strongly recommend everyone to watch this film and extract personal meaning from it.