Naivety World

Anora is one of the most raw, unflinching films you’ll ever see. At first, it looks like a love story, a stripper meets a Russian Oligarch’s son, and within days they’re married in Las Vegas. It’s wild and impulsive, and for a moment, you almost want to believe in this fairytale.

Small spoiler warning before we go deeper, this one is hard to talk about without giving some things away.

Anora takes the classic Cinderella fantasy and flips it completely. This is not a love story. It’s a story about class, power, and the human need to escape. The film follows Anora, a stripper from Brooklyn, and Ivan “Vanya,” the spoiled, impulsive son of a Russian billionaire. When the two run off to Las Vegas and get married, it feels like a fairytale come true for Ani.

Their relationship begins as a paid arrangement, which quickly blurs when Vanya proposes marriage on a whim to avoid returning to Russia. For Ani, Vanya isn’t just wealth, he’s proof she is desirable, worth more than her circumstances. The relationship offers a luxurious escape, and she lets herself be swept up in the dream, believing marriage to Vanya could be her happily ever after. Vanya’s “love,” however, is a mix of infatuation and rebellion against his powerful parents. They are two people using each other to escape their own lives.

The illusion unravels fast. When Vanya’s parents find out, they send people to erase Ani from his life before she can stain their name. The film’s mood shifts along with the story, from vibrant to somber. The glamour that made their union feel magical is gone.

Vanya, once passionate and impulsive, folds under pressure and runs. His weakness makes him cruel. He abandons accountability, leaving Ani to defend their marriage and try to hold on to her new title as “Ivan’s wife.” What follows is a darkly funny odyssey to find him and annul the marriage. Even in this chaos, Ani keeps trying to cement herself as Ivan’s wife. It doesn’t work. The marriage is annulled, Vanya is flown back to Russia, and Ani is left with a payout that feels more like payment for silence.

By the time everything collapses, it’s clear there was never love between them, not in the way we wish there was. There was longing, projection, escapism, but not love. And yet, the film offers an unexpected truth about connection through Igor, one of the Armenian enforcers. In the middle of the chaos, he shows Ani small acts of kindness. He drives her back to Brooklyn and gives her back her wedding ring, which had been taken from her, and her payout. Because Ani has only ever known love as a transaction, she instinctively tries to repay him with sex. But when Igor leans in to truly kiss her, she pulls back and finally breaks down. For the first time in the film, she mourns the loss of her fairytale and the toll her life has taken.

Baker doesnt give us closure. He doesn’t glamorize her pain. He wants you to feel it, the weight of realizing you are not cinderella

Anora is a reminder that sometimes, what we fall in love with isn’t a person, it’s the idea of escape. The fantasy that love will save us from loneliness, from boredom, from the weight of our own lives. And when that fantasy collapses, it hurts even more, leaving us emptier because it feels like losing a future we almost believed in.

Ani wasn’t foolish. We’ve all been there, hoping love might rescue us. We’ve all mistaken attention for affection. We’ve all believed at some point that our worth is tied to someone’s ability to see us and want us. We’ve all believed that being chosen by the right person could rewrite our story.

But Anora shows the cost of placing that hope entirely in someone else. When we base our worth, our story, our life on another person, we risk tying our happiness to something that can vanish the moment it is tested. 

Real love isn’t escapism. It doesn’t arrive to sweep us away from our reality or rescue us from ourselves. If anything, it demands courage to be vulnerable, to confront your own flaws and fears. It demands accountability to yourself and to the other person, to stand by what you say and feel even when it is difficult. It demands growth, the willingness to learn and heal from destructive patterns. And it demands depth, the patience, the understanding, and the emotional honesty to truly know another person while also knowing yourself.

In the end, Anora doesn’t just show a failed relationship, it shows the cost of looking for salvation in someone else, and in doing so, we are left with the question: if love cannot save you, can you save yourself?