Anora (2024): Ending Explained

Quick Recap

Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a 23-year-old stripper working in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, experiences what seems like a modern Cinderella story when she meets Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov, the 21-year-old son of a powerful Russian oligarch. What begins as a paid arrangement—Vanya specifically requests her because she speaks Russian—quickly escalates into something more intense. He offers her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week, during which they party extravagantly and fly to Las Vegas.

In a whirlwind Vegas trip, Vanya impulsively proposes marriage, explaining that if he marries an American citizen, he won't have to return to Russia to work at his father's company—something he clearly dreads. Despite initial reluctance, Anora accepts after Vanya insists his feelings are genuine. They elope at a Vegas chapel, he buys her an expensive wedding ring and fur coat, and she moves into his family's lavish Brooklyn mansion, quitting her job to embrace her new life as the wife of a billionaire's son.

The fantasy shatters when news of the marriage reaches Russia. Vanya's mother Galina immediately orders Toros, Vanya's Armenian godfather and family fixer, to arrange an annulment. Toros sends his henchmen Garnik and Igor to the mansion, where they confront Anora and inform Vanya he's being taken back to Russia. When they call her a prostitute and suggest Vanya only married her for a green card, a violent altercation erupts. Vanya escapes, and Anora physically fights the men before being subdued. The rest of the film follows their desperate search through Brooklyn's nightlife to find Vanya, eventually locating him drunk at her former strip club.

What Happens in the Ending

The film's climax occurs at the airport when Vanya's parents, Nikolai and Galina, arrive from Russia. In a moment of defiance and hope, Anora approaches them and introduces herself in Russian, attempting to establish herself as their legitimate daughter-in-law. However, Galina coldly rejects her without acknowledgment, treating her as beneath their family's status.

The crushing blow comes from Vanya himself. Rather than standing up for their marriage or the love he claimed to feel, he immediately capitulates to his parents' demands. He tells Anora that their marriage is "impossible," essentially abandoning everything he promised her. Galina then orders everyone onto a plane to Las Vegas to finalize the annulment (since the marriage took place in Nevada, not New York, making the New York courthouse dismissal earlier meaningless).

The film's final scenes show Igor, one of Toros's henchmen who had been relatively kind to Anora throughout the ordeal, driving her home. The two sit in silence until Anora breaks down crying. Igor attempts to comfort her, and in a moment of vulnerability and desperation for human connection, Anora initiates a kiss. However, she quickly pulls away and exits the car, walking alone toward the boardwalk as Igor watches her go. The film ends with Anora isolated, her Cinderella fantasy completely shattered, walking away from the wreckage of her brief marriage.

The Meaning Behind the Ending

The ending of Anora is a devastating deconstruction of the Cinderella narrative and modern fairy tale myths. Rather than validating the "love conquers all" or "rags to riches" fantasy, Sean Baker deliberately subverts it to expose the harsh realities of class division, transactional relationships, and the commodification of women.

Vanya's betrayal isn't surprising in retrospect—the film has been building to this moment by showing us exactly who he is: a spoiled, immature man-child who has never had to face real consequences or make difficult choices. His "love" for Anora was sincere in the moment but fundamentally shallow, unable to withstand even the slightest pressure from his parents. He chooses wealth, privilege, and comfort over Anora without hesitation, revealing that their relationship was always built on an unequal foundation. He could afford to play at rebellion; she genuinely believed in transformation.

The scene with Igor in the car is particularly complex and heartbreaking. Throughout the film, Igor has been the most empathetic of Vanya's godfather's men—he's been kind to Anora, even protective at times. Her attempt to kiss him can be read multiple ways: as a reflexive return to transactional sexuality (the only currency she's been taught has value), as a desperate grasp for human connection after abandonment, or as confusion about the only genuine kindness she's experienced throughout this nightmare. When she pulls away and leaves, it represents a moment of self-preservation—a recognition that she doesn't need to give anything more of herself to anyone.

Character Arcs and Resolution

Anora's Journey: Anora's arc is one of disillusionment but also, potentially, awakening. She begins the film as someone who has learned to navigate a world where her body and sexuality are her primary assets. The marriage represented what she thought was an escape from that reality—a genuine emotional connection that transcended transactional relationships. By the end, she's been brutally reminded that class barriers are real and nearly insurmountable, that her worth in the eyes of the wealthy remains tied to her "usefulness," and that fairy tales don't come true for girls like her. However, her decision to walk away from Igor suggests a refusal to return to old patterns, even in her moment of deepest vulnerability. She's hurt but not destroyed.

Vanya's "Development": Vanya doesn't develop—that's the point. He remains exactly who he was: a wealthy boy playing at rebellion who was never serious about any of it. His tears and protestations throughout the film were real in the moment but utterly meaningless when faced with real-world consequences. He returns to Russia, to his father's company, to his predetermined life, having learned nothing except perhaps that he can get away with anything.

Igor's Complicated Role: Igor emerges as perhaps the most complex character. As a working-class man in service to the wealthy, he occupies a middle space—not as powerless as Anora, but not free like Vanya. His kindness toward Anora seems genuine, but he's also complicit in the system that crushes her dreams. His expression as he watches her walk away suggests he understands what's happened to her, perhaps even recognizes the injustice, but is ultimately powerless (or unwilling) to change anything.

Alternate Interpretations

The Cynical Reading: Some viewers might interpret the ending as a cautionary tale about sex workers attempting to escape their circumstances through relationships with wealthy clients. From this perspective, the film becomes a warning that class mobility through romance is a dangerous fantasy. However, this reading risks blaming Anora for believing in love rather than criticizing the system that made such beliefs so costly.

The Feminist Reading: A more nuanced interpretation sees the film as an indictment of how capitalism and patriarchy intersect to commodify women's bodies, emotions, and dreams. Anora isn't naïve—she's been forced to be pragmatic her entire life. The tragedy isn't that she believed in fairy tales, but that a society that constantly sells women these narratives (through media, culture, and romance) punishes them for buying into them. The ending becomes less about Anora's failure and more about systemic betrayal.

The Class Warfare Reading: The ending can be viewed as a stark illustration of class consciousness and class war. Vanya's parents don't even see Anora as human—she's a problem to be solved, a transaction to be undone. The film suggests that no amount of love, legal marriage, or individual connection can overcome the structural barriers the wealthy erect to protect their resources and bloodlines. Anora never had a chance; the system was always rigged against her.

Themes and Symbolism

The Wedding Ring: The expensive ring Vanya buys Anora, which Toros confiscates, symbolizes how easily the trappings of wealth can be given and taken away. It represents the illusion of permanence and belonging that wealth can create, but which remains fundamentally unstable when you haven't earned it through the "right" channels (i.e., being born into it).

Brighton Beach: The Russian-American neighborhood where Anora lives represents diaspora, displacement, and the complicated relationship immigrants have with the American Dream. Both Anora and Vanya are connected to Russian heritage, but their experiences of it couldn't be more different—she's from working-class immigrant stock; he's from oligarch elite. The neighborhood symbolizes how proximity doesn't equal equality.

The Strip Club Return: Finding Vanya drunk at Anora's former workplace, being entertained by another dancer, is symbolic devastation. It represents how easily he can replace her, how little she actually meant despite his protestations of love. It's also a visual reminder that she can never truly escape her past in the eyes of people like Vanya—he'll always see her first as what she was, not who she could become.

The Lonely Walk: The final image of Anora walking alone on the boardwalk is both devastating and potentially empowering. She's isolated, yes, but she's also free from illusion. She's walking away from false comfort (Igor), from fantasy (Vanya), from the whole tangled mess. Whether this represents defeat or the first step toward authentic self-determination remains deliberately ambiguous.

Final Thoughts

Anora works as an ending because it refuses to provide the catharsis or redemption that mainstream cinema trains us to expect. Sean Baker doesn't rescue Anora through last-minute intervention, nor does he completely destroy her. Instead, he leaves her in the most realistic place possible: damaged but surviving, disillusioned but still walking forward.

The film's power lies in how it makes us complicit in wanting the fairy tale to work out, then refuses to give it to us. We want Vanya to be better than he is; we want his parents to recognize Anora's humanity; we want Igor's kindness to mean something transformative. But Baker understands that these desires reflect our own investment in narratives that obscure the real violence of class and gender hierarchies.

The ending is both deeply pessimistic about structural change and cautiously hopeful about individual resilience. Anora has been used, discarded, and humiliated, but she hasn't been annihilated. She's learned a brutal lesson about the limits of love and desire in a world organized around capital and class. Whether this knowledge will destroy or empower her remains an open question—and perhaps that's the most honest ending Baker could have given us.

What makes Anora remarkable is that it earns its tragedy. This isn't misery porn or poverty tourism. It's a carefully constructed examination of how modern American capitalism continues to sell fairy tales to the people it systematically excludes from happy endings. The film's refusal to provide false hope is ultimately more respectful to its protagonist than any manufactured triumph could have been.