Just as we can never be sure, even if we wanted to– I mean, if we were sure, you couldn't be sure of that.
felt like watching a stage play - a single conversation, in a single location, over the course of a single day. not perfect by any means and in fact flawed in many ways, but a film I will be thinking about for a long time.
to me, a story at its core about the nature of…
GERTY, we're not programmed. We're people, do you understand?
a fairly straightforward sci-fi trope executed in a delicate and haunting manner. a claustrophobic film pervaded with a deep loneliness and anguished longing for human connection. and yet, despite all the bleakness, there was something really stubbornly optimistic about this film's point of view.
stellar performance by sam rockwell, stunning visuals and cinematography (those shots of the moon rovers and the harvesters, and the sharpness of the exterior light, just wow), and a gorgeous score (the main theme!!)
this film was at its best as an absurd, dark, horror-comedy; it leaned cleverly into the humour to create an unsettling dissonance with the horror of what Ani was going through.
but for a film called Anora it really wasn't about her at all. and in its attempts to, I don't know, destigmatise sex work, it came across as garishly stereotypical. and frankly exploitative of women in a way it was (probably?) trying to critique. did we really need to…
the kind of film you put off watching for years because surely all the hype is just an overcorrection against all the hate it got back in the day? and then you finally watch it and it absolutely delivers
maybe it's a good thing the marketing for this film was so bad when it came out, because if I had watched it at 16 when I was deep in the trenches of my weird toxic all girls school pseudo-romantic sapphic friendships, pretty sure it would have exploded my brain
