Those invested in the commercial viability of adult, complex, ambitious filmmaking tend to experience post-COVID box-office reports like a roller coaster. Every year, some of the most heavily marketed, spectacularly reviewed awards contenders simply fail to take off with audiences. Cate Blanchett’s Tár brought in a fraction of the ticket sales it likely would’ve managed pre-COVID; ditto Steven Spielberg’s back-to-back best-picture nominees West Side Story and The Fabelmans. As this fall season launched, highlighted by a bunch of promising titles, headlines indicated that the theatrical climate was not improving.
Allow me to play optimist for a moment here, though. The most creatively successful movies to come out of the year’s major film festivals, from Cannes to Telluride to Toronto, are by and large finding an audience. They’re building on the momentum of last year’s gains, which saw small and/or challenging titles ranging from Past Lives to The Zone of Interest to Poor Things gross north of $40 million globally—apiece.
Neon has been steadily rolling out its Palme d’Or winner, Anora, over the past few weeks to striking results. In its second weekend in theaters, the Sean Baker critical darling surged to number eight overall at the domestic box-office, despite screening in only 34 theaters; its opening frame elicited the second-best per-theater dollar average gross since COVID, and one that also would have been impressive in any year pre-2020, given its brazen originality and lack of marquee talent. Baker himself has been making movies for decades, and will easily set a box-office record for himself with Anora.
It’s the kind of traditional, gradual platform rollout that many consider to be dying, in an era where indies need to gobble up as much cash as quickly as possible. “There are some old tools that I think are still absolutely the way to bring films into market—launching at top-tier festivals, working your way into fall and setting yourself up for multiple windows,” Neon’s CEO Tom Quinn tells me. “The only thing I would say is, you can’t be a pretender. For those films that merit that kind of release, I think you can be handsomely rewarded.”
Quinn knows a thing or two about this. Neon’s historic streak of backing five Palme d’Or winners in a row includes the phenomenon of Parasite and last year’s international juggernaut, Anatomy of a Fall. “Anatomy of a Fall was a $5 million grossing film, but on home ent. [entertainment] it did the same number—which is off the charts. That’s 10 times what it should do on home ent.,” Quinn says. “When we tested Anatomy of a Fall, the number one reason why people came to see the film was that it won the Palme d’Or.”
In other words, good buzz still matters. Last weekend, Focus Features saw its big contender Conclave exceed expectations, grossing $6.6 million in under 1,800 theaters. Over the week that followed, it upped that total to nearly $10 million, signaling strong word-of-mouth that will take the Edward Berger papal drama far across the fall. It’s finding audiences in the same corridor—in similar volume—that Focus saw just last year for The Holdovers, another significant post-COVID success for a smaller-scale character drama: That film made more than $20 million domestically, significantly more than director Alexander Payne’s last independent feature, 2013’s Nebraska.
Conclave was one of the splashiest world premieres out of Telluride. Another, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, platformed successfully in select venues in late September before flatlining in its wide theatrical break—so much so that Conclave, in just seven days of release, has already outgrossed Reitman’s film. But Saturday Night also elicited relatively mixed reviews. All of those aforementioned successes from the last few years—Past Lives, Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things—hit the “universal acclaim” tier on review aggregator Metacritic. That’s not true of Saturday Night, or The Apprentice—another specialty title struggling in US markets—or the self-financed fiascos that are Megalopolis and Horizon, both of which have been critical punching bags.
“When people see a movie and/or a certain sentiment takes hold, it travels faster than it ever has—and things underperform at an alarming rate too,” Quinn says. “Without naming names, companies, or movies, there’s a certain part of the business that needs a reset—some of it’s IP driven, some of it’s serving a genre in a way that’s either fresh or interesting.”
This fall’s ultimate example of that reset is The Substance, a body-horror extravaganza made by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. The Cannes premiere of the film I attended was the most electric screening I’ve gone to this year. The Substance opened fairly quietly in North America for distributor Mubi, an outcome that felt severely disappointing. But the movie held on; then it roared. Maintaining some of the best week-to-week holds of any film this year, it’s now managed an approximately $14.5 million domestic haul, with more than $40 million worldwide. It’s the biggest success ever for the relatively nascent Mubi, and a powerful statement that originality can still sell.
Universal was originally set to make this movie with Fargeat. The studio greenlit her script and production had already started when executives started getting queasy. “You can write, ‘It’s going to be tons of blood,’ but people don’t really think it’s going to be that much—having something on the page, and having something on the screen are two very different things,” Fargeat tells me.
She ended up having to part ways with the studio to make the movie she believed in: “I needed to stick to my choices, but there were for sure some very hard moments—because you feel alone, you feel rejected, you feel like you created a monster.” Fargeat took The Substance to Cannes amid that heartache and without a distributor; by the festival’s end, Mubi had acquired it and Fargeat won the screenplay prize. The risk, already, had paid off.
That The Substance actually made money from there? Let that be a powerful lesson as the specialty roller coaster continues: Some creative bravery in Hollywood, at least, can still be rewarded as it should.
Anora: A Bold Narrative
Sean Baker’s Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is widely considered an Oscar favorite, isn’t just one of the year’s most acclaimed movies—it’s three of them. The story of a sex worker who develops a relationship with the high-rolling son of a Russian oligarch, Baker’s film follows a more or less traditional three-act structure, but those acts vary wildly in tone, so much that if you weren’t in a movie theater, you might think for a moment that you’d accidentally sat on the remote. That feeling of disjuncture is entirely intentional. Baker, an avowed fan of wild tonal shifts, has described Anora as a 50-minute romantic comedy followed by “90 minutes of reality.” But the latter section is also split in two, between a frantic farce that lasts roughly an hour and a melancholy coda that casts everything we’ve seen before in a new and more complicated light.
The Unexpected Ending
The third part especially throws audiences for a loop. After nearly two solid hours of various kinds of chaos, Baker suddenly steps on the brakes, slowing the movie to a crawl. Ani (Mikey Madison), a dancer at a Manhattan strip club, has lived out the Pretty Woman fantasy of getting married to a wealthy client, a Russian oligarch’s son named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn). And she’s watched that fantasy unravel, as Vanya flees at the first hint of trouble and leaves Ani to deal with his father’s hired thugs, including the sweetly apologetic Igor (Yura Borisov). Vanya’s parents fly in from Russia, pressure their spineless son into annulling the marriage, and then, as quickly as it started, Ani’s whirlwind romance is over. All that remains is for Igor to escort her back to what’s left of her old life.
By this point, Baker has been dropping hints for a while that there might be chemistry between Ani and Igor, despite the fact that their meet-cute involves him binding her hands with a lamp cord and shoving a gag in her mouth. Although she’s a third-generation American who barely speaks Russian and he’s practically just off the plane from Moscow, they’re both working stiffs who are used to satisfying the whims of wealthy men. Baker, whose movies, like Tangerine and Red Rocket, often focus on sex workers, has said that one of his aims is to destigmatize the profession, and he has Ani and Igor meet as equals—just two people trying to do their jobs. But by the time Anora contrives to get them alone, we’ve seen too much to just swap one unlikely romance for another. After Vanya and his family exit the scene, most movies would wrap up with a quick grace note, vaguely hinting at a possible future for Ani and her former captor. And Baker has stuck just close enough to the genre’s template that you might feel a faint urge to start gathering your things at the two-hour mark. But he keeps going past the point where the movie could easily have ended, and suddenly we’re off the map, with no idea what’s going to happen, or what could.
A Twist on Hollywood Tropes
Anora’s first act suggests that Baker could be one of Hollywood’s reigning rom-com directors if he had any interest in the job. A devoted cinephile whose Instagram account is dedicated to showing off his collection of vintage movie posters, Baker seems less like the heir apparent to Nora Ephron than the Criterion Closet in human form: Anora’s credits offer special thanks for inspiration to the sexploitation director Jesús Franco and Vampyros Lesbos star Soledad Miranda. But he loves classic forms like romance and screwball comedy too much to steer clear of them entirely, especially if no one else seems inclined to pick up the torch. Anora’s first act has shades of Pretty Woman, of course, but also a whiff of Working Girl, with its story of an outer-borough hustler trying to navigate the world of the wealthy. (Ani too has a head for business and a bod for sin.) If it weren’t for the frequent nudity and torrents of profanity, you could plausibly recast the movie with Preston Sturges regulars.
Baker bookends his 50-minute rom-com with Take That’s saccharine “Greatest Day,” which plays over the opening shot of Ani and her co-workers doling out lap dances and again as Ani and Vanya exchange vows in a Las Vegas chapel. And he punctuates it with an aerial pull-back from Vanya’s sprawling Mill Basin mansion—shot, as Baker takes pains to point out, with an old-school helicopter instead of a drone. But his version of the classic Hollywood form is as much grit as gloss, with Ani indulgently rolling her eyes as the perpetually wired Vanya pumps away on top of her and finishes in a matter of seconds. This isn’t love at first sight. It’s just a transaction, and the movie keeps us wondering how much of Ani’s growing affection is genuine and how much is just her way of keeping a whale on the hook.
It would be a stretch to say we’re ever meant to believe Ani and Vanya are really in love, but we’re not in a world where love conquers all. It’s enough that the two seem to like each other, that Vanya is more of an endearing goofball than a spoiled brat—they even seem to have good sex, once Ani coaches him to slow down and enjoy things a little. He’s got money and wants to have fun; Ani needs one and can provide the other. (Besides, he proposes in Vegas: Why not roll the dice?) If marriage is a successful partnership, they’ve got the makings of one, and the inevitable confrontation with his parents will give Vanya the chance to prove that he’s in it for real.
The Shift to Reality
Vanya, however, doesn’t just flunk the test—he flees it. Word of the marriage gets back to his mother in Russia, who furiously dispatches her husband’s minions: Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian priest who knocks off in the middle of a christening when he gets the call; his bumbling brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan); and a man they initially refer to only as “the Russian,” who turns out to be Igor. Given how important Igor ends up being to the movie, I was surprised the second time I watched Anora that it takes nearly an hour for him to show up on screen. (Toros is glimpsed much earlier, trying to keep revelers from jumping on the couch during Vanya’s New Year’s Eve blowout.) But it makes sense that Igor can only take the stage once Vanya has left it, bolting out of the house on foot the moment he realizes his parents have gotten wise.
That leaves Ani alone with Igor and Garnick, whose only orders are to keep her there. Vanya’s father has explicitly forbidden them to lay hands on his son, so they have no choice but to let him run out the door. But they’re under no such restriction when it comes to Ani. When she tries to leave, they physically restrain her, and Ani fights back, hard. We’ve spent most of the previous hour in the world of romantic comedy, where nothing gets broken except the occasional heart. But now we’re in a new place, and it’s not clear what the ground rules are.
We know that Vanya’s dad is rich enough that a glance at his Wikipedia entry makes Ani’s eyes pop, but we don’t know whether he’s the kind of oligarch who solves his problems by dumping people’s bodies in the river—and, more to the point, neither does Ani. When Igor binds her hands and bends her over the couch, the only guarantee that she’s not about to be assaulted or killed is that we’re not watching the kind of movie that’s about to do something so horrible to its main character. Or at least we hope we’re not. This section of the movie played vastly differently to me the second time through, once I knew Ani wasn’t going to be seriously harmed, than it did the first, when I couldn’t shake the feeling that things might be about to take a dark turn in the vein of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. (Baker has cited Demme as a major influence.) Baker plays up the slapstick quality of Ani’s resistance, like the moment where she goes from sweet-talking Garnick to kicking him full in the face. But he breaks up the comedy with screen-filling closeups of Ani’s eyes and mouth, which emphasize the realness of the threat she feels. She’s fighting for her life.
I’ve had friendly arguments about that sense of danger—some people who love the film didn’t feel it at all—but Anora’s ending reinforces the idea that we’re meant to take it at least somewhat to heart. The movie’s first two parts pass in a mad rush, fueled by the thrill of romance and the panic of collapse, and it’s only once that’s over that we, and Ani, have time to think. Vanya’s gone, and with him any hope that she will strike it rich; all that’s left is for Igor to fly her back to New York and pay her the $10,000 the family has ungraciously offered for her time. The bank doesn’t open until the morning, so Ani and Igor spend a night alone in Vanya’s mansion, the quietest and most sustained interaction between characters in the entire movie.
A Complicated Encounter
Ani is still deeply angry, and she takes it out on Igor, mocking his “stupid name” and accusing him of having “rape eyes.” And while he defends his name—“it means warrior,” he points out, stumbling over the w—he lets the latter insult sit for a moment. Ani is just lashing out, looking for weak spots; she later accuses him, essentially, of not being man enough to rape her. But he knows how scared she was, and that he’s at best complicit in a string of events that have disrespected and degraded her. Sure, he made a futile attempt to get Vanya to apologize, but Igor owes Ani an apology as well.
The closest Igor can do to making things right is to hand Ani back her diamond engagement ring, apparently pilfered at some point from Toros’ coat pocket. With a heavy snow falling, he pulls up to Ani’s house and watches her lug her bags up the stairs, with no reason to ever see him again. But then she turns and comes back to the car, and in a moment, she’s straddling him and unbuckling his pants. Igor tries to kiss her, but in response she starts hitting him, and he grabs her arms to restrain her. They don’t stop having sex, but rather than Vanya’s frenzied moaning, Igor’s reaction is so quiet you can’t hear him over the sound of the idling engine and the squeak of the windshield wipers. This is, presumably, what he wanted, but he’s practically immobile, more obedient than aroused. And then Ani, sensing that it’s not working for either of them, collapses in his arms, sobbing, as if the weight of what she’s been though has landed on her all at once. Cut to black. Credits.
The interaction is complicated and ambiguous, and Baker, who edited the film as well as writing and directing it, plays the moment in one unbroken, stationary shot, as if he’s challenging us to make up our own minds. For Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, it’s a promise that “Ani will get the happy ending she deserves,” while the New Yorker’s Justin Chang called it “a moment of rare and complicated grace.” Some see it as optimistic, others despairing; there’s a Reddit thread titled “I didn’t get the last scene of Anora.” Even Baker, who says he couldn’t begin to write the script until he knew what the ending would be, admits that it’s “asking for a lot.”
A New Beginning?
For me, Igor giving Ani the ring is an act of genuine kindness, perhaps the only one in the entire movie. They’re both broke and probably out of a job—Ani’s been fired from the club, and with Vanya heading back to Russia, there’s no one for Igor to keep an eye on—but she needs it more.She comes back to the car to thank him, but Igor doesn’t want her to have sex with him because she feels like she owes him something. He wants a real emotional connection, and so he tries to kiss her, which for many sex workers is more intimate than intercourse. She slaps him because he’s crossed the line, turning what could have been a quick transaction into something more, and after restraining her until the anger subsides, Igor gives in, laying almost motionless so that Ani can feel that she’s balanced the scales. But a door has been opened, and it’s no longer a simple quid pro quo.
Igor doesn’t know Ani too well, but he cares for her—not because she can show him a good time or because he wants her (although he does), but because they both deserve better. And that simple idea breaks through the walls she’s built to keep herself safe. Everything she’s felt in the past several days, the frustration and anger and betrayal, the cruelty of having a life-changing dream dangled in front of her and then snatched away by people who treat her like she’s barely human—it all comes rushing out at once. And Igor just lets it come, holding her as the screen goes black.
That last cut is jarring, and I think it’s the abruptness of Anora’s ending more than its ambiguity that leaves people unsettled. It’s hard to suppress a that’s it? Baker even wrote an epilogue, just for his actors, so they, at least, would have a sense of closure. But the fact that we don’t know, or even have a sense of, where things go from here is the feeling the movie wants to leave us with. There’s no promise that Ani and Igor will ride off into the sunset—Ani, after all, is only 23, an absurd age at which to suggest that the rest of her life’s course is set. But Baker also isn’t going to tell us things are hopeless, that the world is built to grind up people like them, and the best they can hope for is to scrape by one day to the next. We’re outside of genre, outside of structures that tell us stories end for any reason other than that the teller has come to their own conclusion. Ani and Igor’s stories are just beginning. Whether they’re two stories or one is up to us.
