Anora

There are two movies inside Anora, and they barely touch. One is a screwball buddy comedy about four beleaguered grunts scouring New York for their dumb twink boss. That’s the one I love—the one I could watch on repeat. Yuri Borisov is the standout here: a thug-slash-himbo with a heart of gold, trailing a cheap car and a thick accent, radiating a quiet, sheepish charm. But he’s not alone. Mikey Madison’s alpha-bitch aura sparks perfectly against his subdued, awestruck presence, and their chemistry feels both charming and unexpectedly touching. It’s a surprisingly romantic take on the “Russian gangster” archetype. Real Russian thugs would’ve broken a few limbs by minute two to encourage efficient cooperation, but here the violence is constantly deferred in favor of bickering, awkward tenderness, and a comic rhythm that owes more to Hawks and Capra than to gangster flicks. The dynamic is sweeter than it has any right to be, and for a while the film becomes something rare: a romantic screwball set against the grit of immigrant hustlers, where every grimy car ride feels like the prelude to a love confession. But the other movie is a dark, gripping tragedy—a sharp, violent meditation on class trauma and human corruption. Mikey Madison and Mark Edeyshtein both deliver blistering performances (Edeyshtein especially), but for me there is little to hold onto here. The film clearly has a lot to say about exploitation, weakness, and pain, but it never moves beyond diagnosis. It’s like picking at a wound rather than lancing an infection. Identifying pain is one thing; suggesting, however faintly, the possibility of healing is another. As it stands, the tragedy feels both bleak and resigned. It’s less Shakespearean catharsis and more Romeo and Juliet filtered through twenty-first-century nihilism: cynical, depressed, directionless. And that, ultimately, is why I can’t love Anora. The tonal whiplash makes it impossible for me to reconcile the two films within it. The bleakness of the tragedy cancels out the buoyancy of the screwball comedy. A story that contains Zakhharov can’t sell me the existence of Igor.