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

Spoilers for the end of Anora.

Sean Baker’s Anora is like Beautiful woman at the hardened pace of Uncut gems – until the end.

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

Parked outside Ani’s apartment, Igor (said henchman, played by Yura Borisov) gives Ani the fateful wedding ring that the family forced her to give up. Ani climbs on top of him and they start having 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 ends with 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 takes away from … what my intention with the ending was,” Baker said in an interview with Mashable.

“We (Madison and I) felt it would always be a disservice to Ani to discuss it publicly,” he continued. Ani’s mindset at the end of the film is not clarified. There is no music to manipulate the audience, no dialogue, no epilogue, and that is on purpose.

What Baker shared was how the ending came about. “I need to know I have a solid ending before I write a script,” he said of his process, and he knew early on that the protagonist and one of her captors would gravitate towards each other.

“Recently we actually looked back at our first draft and it’s pretty much dead on compared to what we have in the final film.” The only difference? The last shot originally had small talk. Baker and the actors decided to scrap it 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 she actually communicates with someone else in the movie and is heard. And we thought it would be much more interesting if it was a non-verbal communication, and so we cut all the dialogue out of the last shot.”

Sex workers are mixed at Anora end.

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

“I thought it was beautiful,” said Kaytlin Bailey, host The oldest profession’s podcast and founder and CEO of non-profit media organization Old Pros, of the silence at the end of Anora. (Bailey, who is not affiliated with the film, recently saw and enjoyed the film.) “I love that he allows the viewer to fill that space.”

“She talks, speaks for herself – at times screaming – and argues throughout the film, and they (Ani and Igor) don’t need any of that,” said Bailey, who is currently on tour. Whore’s Eye Viewa show about the history of sex work.

When Ani and Igor first meet, he literally holds her back in the scene of the family home. He is also the only man who realizes what she is capable of. But in the final scene, Igor can hold Ani’s place 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 you could see throughout the film that he wanted to hold 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 holds that space for her, said Bailey, who believes this final scene helps make the entire film.

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

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

Piper (which is also not associated with the manufacture of Anora) wasn’t sure what Baker was trying to portray in the final scene. “Was (Ani), trying to hide from her pain, reaching for her sexualized self (perhaps her mask) and then breaking down when Igor kept reaching for intimacy?”

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

The ending of the film for Ani is indeed internal, but the viewer is not 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 to take what they want from it.”

Anora is now in the cinema.