‘Anora’ ending, explained: Sean Baker and sex workers share their thoughts

Spoilers for the ending of Anora.

Sean Baker’s Anora is like Pretty Woman at the harried pace of Uncut Gems — until the ending. 

The film’s final moments are silent, which is a direct contrast to the chaotic journey Ani (Mikey Madison) has just been on. After a whirlwind marriage to a rich client and son of a Russian oligarch (Vanya, played by Mark Eydelshteyn), she’s spent the runtime of the movie chasing her new husband all around New York City with the oligarch’s employees, flying to Vegas to annul the marriage at the forced hand of Vanya’s parents, before finding herself on the way home to her apartment in a henchman’s beat-up car.

Parked outside of Ani’s apartment, Igor (said henchman, played by Yura Borisov) gives Ani the ill-fated wedding ring the family forced her to give up. Ani climbs on top of him and they start to have sex in the front seat, but Ani refuses to let Igor kiss her. Instead, she breaks down crying. They say nothing during this exchange, and the film ends.

Sean Baker leaves Anora‘s ending up to interpretation.

Anora‘s writer and director Sean Baker told Mashable that the way he wrote the ending left it up to the audience’s interpretation — so much so that he didn’t want to share his thoughts.

“I’m worried about giving my opinion on it in any way, shape, or form because then it’s taking away from…what my intention of the ending was,” Baker said in an interview with Mashable.

“We [Madison and I] felt that it was always going to be a disservice to Ani to discuss it publicly,” he continued. Ani’s mindset at the end of the film isn’t spelled out. There’s no music to manipulate the audience, no dialogue, no epilogue, and that’s on purpose. 

What Baker did share was how the ending came about. “I need to know I have a solid ending before writing a screenplay,” he said of his process, and he knew early on that the protagonist and one of her captors were going to gravitate toward each other. 

“Recently, we actually looked back at our first draft, and it is pretty much dead-on from what we have in the final film.” The only difference? The last shot originally had small talk. Baker and the actors decided to scrap that in rehearsals.

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“It just took away from the moment,” Baker explained. “And then we realized, I think especially Mikey and I realized, that this was one of the first times that she’s actually communicating with somebody else in the film and being heard. And we thought it would be much more interesting if that was a non-verbal communication, and so we cut all the dialogue out of that last shot.”

Sex workers are mixed on Anora’s ending.

Since Baker has spoken about consulting with sex workers when developing the script, we decided to reach out to some folks with real-life experience for their opinions on whether or not Anora rang true to them.

“I thought it was beautiful,” said Kaytlin Bailey, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast and founder and executive director of non-profit media organization Old Pros, of the silence at the end of Anora. (Bailey, who’s unaffiliated with the film, recently saw and enjoyed the movie.) “I love that he allows the viewer to fill in that space.”

“She’s talking, self-advocating — at times screaming — arguing the whole film, and they [Ani and Igor] don’t need any of that,” said Bailey, who’s currently touring Whore’s Eye View, a show about the history of sex work.

When Ani and Igor first meet, he is literally restraining her in the scene at the family’s home. He is also the only man who realizes what she’s capable of. But in the final scene, Igor can hold space for Ani for the first time, Bailey said. 

“For him to hold still and allow her to come to him in this deeply, deeply vulnerable moment of exhausted need, it’s almost like an extension of the space that you could tell throughout the film that he wanted to be holding for her,” Bailey continued. Igor works for this “fucked-up family” and does fucked-up things for them — but in that moment he finally gets to be there for Ani.

Ani is only able to be so vulnerable in that moment because Igor is holding that space for her, said Bailey, who believes this final scene makes the whole film. 

Writer and stripper Reese Piper (who has written for Mashable) thought differently of Anora. Ani’s lack of backstory made it hard for Piper to believe how quickly and hard she fell for the fantasy of being married to Vanya. What also stopped Piper from suspending disbelief was Ani’s lack of professional persona. 

“She performs under her real name, and at no point do we see the mask she wears to make money,” Piper told Mashable over email. “Some dancers perform as themselves, or a version of themselves, but it’s always our job to fake or find something attractive about clients that we may not have necessary feel without money. Ani goes over to his house for paid sex, but at what point does she stop working?”

Piper (who is also unaffiliated with the making of Anora) wasn’t sure what Baker was trying to portray in the final scene. “Was [Ani], in an effort to hide from her pain, reaching for her sexualized self (maybe her mask) and then breaking down when Igor kept reaching for intimacy?” 

If so, the ending fell flat for Piper. “We never saw her mask. We never saw stripping as something she used to hide,” she said.

The film’s ending for Ani is indeed internal, but the viewer isn’t privy to her inner thoughts — and this landed for some, but not others. As Baker told Mashable, “It really comes down to the individual audience member to take away what they will from it.”

Anora is now in theaters.