By Francisco Silva -
The most overused and patronising narrative cliché in cinema is the sex worker with the heart of gold. A frame centred, typically, around a male protagonist and his arc of moral redemption in protecting a defenceless woman doing the most demeaning thing another man can think of – selling sex. It provides the author with a way to conduct their sense of purpose while still getting guilt-free titillation. It's the most male-centric perspective of all that has been around since men started telling stories. It was there in Ancient Greece. It's in the Bible. It's in Dumas, Verdi, Shakespeare, John Ford and Orson Welles. It's all around us.
The best thing about Sean Baker’s Anora is how he subverts the trope by not addressing it at all and shifting the point of view to the sex worker instead of the men around her. Ani (Mikey Maddison), short for Anora, is a bubbly and cheerful stripper in New York when she’s requested to spend time with a rich Russian client, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). The two hit it off, and Ivan ends up requesting that Ani spend more and more time with him until they get married in Vegas. When his family finds out, Ivan runs away, leaving Ani with three brutish gangsters to look for him before his powerful and influential parents land in the United States.
Anora is divided into two parts. The first half is a charming fantasy about indulgence. Ani is happy to play the role of the girlfriend, for a price, of course, but is easily charmed by Ivan’s lavish lifestyle. There are no repercussions in this world. They can be as unpredictable as they want, and in the end, a group of maids will come and clean everything. Then there’s the second half when the reality comes crashing in. Ani still believes Ivan is the boy she married, so it comes as a surprise when he runs away and leaves her with three dangerous men – that Ani expertly deals with using a mix of street smarts and hyper-awareness.
What is impressive is how slowly Anora reveals itself to be a film about class difference. The final confrontation with Ivan’s family puts Ani in a situation where her street experience won’t work, forcing her into a position of powerlessness. There’s a moment when reality comes down crashing like an avalanche when he learns that lesson we always knew—there is no justice when facing people with enough money to buy power.
Baker is an interesting filmmaker. His films focus on the outcast – trans people, a single mother living in a motel outside of Disneyland – but they are injected with this joy for life and rarely feel patronising. His camera lingers like cinema verité, often shot on an iPhone for more of that true-to-life feeling. He’s not there to exploit their misery but to give them some time to shine. And that’s where Anora stands out. Baker doesn’t just give her voice; he lets Maddison flesh out that character with so much intensity that she bursts through the screen. She never feels completely lost (apart from that scene at the end when the reality of her status hits her in the face) because she’s the result of her own experiences – a person who always had to make do with the hand dealt to her, fight for her own financial independence. She is resilient because anyone in her circumstances would be.
Baker’s observation is only heightened by Maddison’s career-defining performance. Our favourite of the year, she’s somewhere between Giulietta Masina and Shirley MacLaine. Her performance is so pitch perfect that it uncovers the film’s only misstep – in the last scene, a tender moment between Ani and one of the gangsters is broken by Ani doing something I found utterly out of character by her and Maddison’s standard. Just a tiny moment that reminded me that this film was written by a straight man, and some impulses are hard to let go of.
It doesn’t take away from the film’s power. Anora is a joyful masterpiece.
Verdict: 4.5 out of 5
Like an Adriana-centric episode of The Sopranos directed by John Cassavetes
Nosferatu
The original Nosferatu, subtitled A Symphony of Horror, was a 1922 horror film directed by German expressionist master F. W. Murnau. Legend goes that Murnau failed to secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so he re-adapted that story with a different name for the creature, clinching closer to the book’s message about sexual coercion and repressed sexuality. In 1979, Werner Herzog, another German, partnered with Klaus Kinki to deliver a new Nosferatu with the subtitle Phantom of the Night. This effort dropped any pretension to separate it from Bram Stoker and reshuffled the message to be about the creeping and slow spread of the AIDS epidemic.
It is fitting that in 2024, Robert Egger, a filmmaker so set in the aesthetic of medieval Central and Northern European culture, would bring the Murnau version to a new generation: now with no subtitles because we’re in the 21st century, and we’re all about brevity, baby.
It makes sense that this was to be his next project after the enjoyable The Northman. The filmmaker who crashed into the scene with the almost-perfect horror fable The VVitch would obviously evolve to re-adapt one of the most famous horror movies in history to a new modern audience, continuing a tradition of repurposing and readaptation that Murnau himself set.
The story remains the same, which is to say, precisely like Bram Stoker’s – Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is tasked to travel to Transylvania to complete the purchase of a castle by the mysterious Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård). Meanwhile, Thomas’ wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) suffers from delirious visions and is haunted by an ominous Orlock. Her caretaker in the husband’s absence, Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), enlists the help of professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who immediately recognises the situation as being related to a vampire creature, and all the while, Orlock’s on its way to Germany.
The main problem with Eggers’ vision is he blurs the line between Murnau and Stoker’s all the way to the design of the Count. Murnau’s distinction was a crippling and creepy man who looked both fragile and otherworldly. Eggers gives him the moustache of Stoker, an imposing and threatening figure with a thundering voice. He seems more Carpathian than Murnau, who’s halfway between a skeleton and a gargoyle.
The impact there is not as strong, but at least Eggers complements it all with a brooding atmosphere and clings more to the source’s sexual politics. This film is dark. Every shot is filled with carefully placed shadows the characters constantly get lost in. There are rats everywhere, even before Orlock arrives in Germany, giving the idea these threats already existed in that place even before the Count arrives. He is only a personification of that society’s rotten vices.
And then there’s Ellen, the de facto main character. Nosferatu starts with her being possessed by the Count in a dream. The attack is a mix of violent and alluring sexual assault. When she wakes up, we find that her marriage with Thomas is not sexually gratifying but emotionally fulfilling. Ellen lives in this limbo between having no physical pleasure in her married life and being emotionally abused by a menacing man. There is no in-between, no consideration for her needs. If you’re a woman and relate to this feeling, it’s on purpose.
That said, I admit I wasn’t impressed by Depp’s performance. She can play the possessed part, strung between pain and ecstasy. But everything else feels too staged and forced as if she arrived from an play adaptation of Jane Austen. There is no gravity in her intensity, no allure, just an unappealing broodiness.
Hoult is terrific, though. For a moment, the film tricks us into thinking we are following the main character, and it’s a gas to see Hoult’s bumbling idiot trying to understand the situation he put himself in. He sells Thomas’ “nice guy” shtick with genuine endearment, so the final resolution and Ellen’s decision do not seem far-fetched. She’s given full agency at the end, and Thomas remains dejected and confused.
Nosferatu is a good film—not great, not ground-breaking, but a perfect adaptation of our modern themes. Eggers is in his classic phase. Far from the exciting bravado of The VVitch or The Lighthouse, he feels comfortable being measured in his approach to horror. There’s more subtlety in his last two films, and while I’m still not giving him a full mark, there’s space in the future to revisit both Nosferatu and The Northman and find a lot more to talk about.
Verdict: 4 out of 5
An oppressive and atmospheric take on the Dracula myth that feels both classic and thematically refreshing.
