Sean Baker’s Anora spends much of its runtime dangling a darkly funny, almost fairytale premise—Ani, a Brighton Beach performer, swept into a whirlwind marriage with Vanya, the impulsive son of a Russian oligarch—only to pull the rug out with a final stretch that’s grounded, sobering, and intentionally unresolved.
Critics and the filmmakers have repeatedly framed the ending as something meant to be felt more than “solved,” with Baker himself describing the film as a tonal rollercoaster that ultimately has to bring the audience back to a raw reality.
That’s why the last sequence—set largely inside a car as Ani sits with Igor, the bodyguard who’s treated her with an unexpected tenderness—lands with such force. Rather than delivering a clean wrap-up after the chaos of annulment threats and public humiliation, the film closes on an emotional collision: money, dignity, and the crushing recognition of what Ani briefly thought she could outrun.
What happens in the final car scene
By the time Ani and Igor arrive back near her place, Ani’s “escape” has effectively collapsed. Entertainment Weekly recounts that the fairytale fantasy ends at the airport, where Vanya and his parents make clear she’s disposable—and any attempt to fight back is met with intimidation that underlines how little power she truly has in their world.
In the car afterward, Igor makes a final gesture of decency: he returns the wedding ring, a moment that reads as both restitution and recognition that she was wronged.
Ani responds in the language she’s been trained—socially and economically—to use: she tries to turn the moment into something practical as if gratitude or connection must be “paid for” in the currency she knows others expect from her. When Igor tries to shift that exchange into something more personal, Ani recoils, lashes out, and then breaks down.
Behind the scenes, Baker has said the ending was always designed this way, down to the snow outside and the rhythm of the windshield wipers, because he wanted the story to snap back from heightened, comedic chaos into something “sobering” and emotionally naked.
What it means for Ani’s ultimate fate
The key to the ending isn’t whether Ani “chooses” Igor or whether Igor represents a new romantic path—most reputable takes caution against reading the finale as a conventional love story.
Entertainment Weekly argues the scene is “not romantic” so much as psychologically revealing: Ani is trying to reassert control after being demeaned by extreme wealth and tossed aside, and her reaction when Igor tries to make it personal signals a boundary—she can endure transaction, but genuine closeness in that moment is intolerable.
Read another way—one echoed in UK GQ’s analysis—the ending is deliberately un-Hollywood because the film’s central fantasy (class escape via marriage) is never allowed to become a clean wish fulfillment.
The final breakdown is the moment Ani fully registers what the last 48 hours cost her emotionally: she came close to a different life, only to be reminded, brutally, that the gatekeepers of that world can shut it instantly.
Even the people closest to the scene have emphasized its openness. In Vulture’s interview, Yura Borisov (Igor) declines to lock the moment into a single meaning, arguing that viewers’ personal interpretation matters—and that the emotional truth is in the shifting, second-by-second dynamic between them.
So what does it mean for Ani’s fate? The most defensible conclusion—based on Baker’s comments and major critical readings—is that the ending isn’t forecasting a new relationship or a tidy next chapter. It’s showing Ani hitting a wall: the point where performance collapses, guarded armor fails, and the grief of being reduced to a disposable object finally surfaces in full.
