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In the glittering underbelly of Cold War espionage, where haute couture catwalks collide with clandestine kill rooms, Luc Besson’s Anna bursts onto screens as a high-octane spy thriller that reimagines the femme fatale archetype with balletic brutality and breathless deception. Released in 2019 but finding fresh legs on Netflix in 2025 amid a surge of retro-spy revivals, this 119-minute adrenaline rush—styled simply as ANИA in its promotional flair—transports viewers from the frostbitten streets of late-1980s Moscow to the opulent runways of Paris, blending the seductive allure of fashion with the shadowy machinations of intelligence agencies. Besson’s signature flair for stylized action, seen in hits like Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, propels the narrative forward, but Anna distinguishes itself with a non-linear structure that mirrors the protagonist’s fractured loyalties, jumping across timelines to unveil a mosaic of passion, peril, and precarious freedom.

At its heart, Anna chronicles the titular character’s audacious bid for autonomy in a world rigged against her. A striking young woman born into poverty and brutality in the crumbling Soviet Union, Anna Poliatova (Sasha Luss) seizes a devil’s bargain: trade her life of abuse for a covert role as a KGB assassin. Recruited by the enigmatic operative Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans), she endures grueling training that hones her into a lethal instrument—graceful as a gazelle, deadly as a viper. Posing as an international supermodel, Anna infiltrates the elite circles of Europe, her lithe frame and enigmatic smile serving as the perfect camouflage for high-profile eliminations. But as the Berlin Wall crumbles and the USSR fractures into chaos, the rules change. The KGB, rebranded in the post-Soviet haze, reneges on its promise of a clean exit after five years of service. Retirement, they decree, is a luxury reserved for the dead.

What follows is a labyrinth of double-crosses and divided allegiances. Anna’s Parisian life becomes a high-wire act: strutting for designers by day, silencing targets by night. She forges tentative bonds—a steamy romance with fellow model Maud (Lera Abova), sanctioned by her handlers as cover; a charged flirtation with CIA operative Leonard “Lenny” Miller (Cillian Murphy), who senses her hidden depths. Under the watchful eye of her steely superior Olga (Helen Mirren), Anna juggles missions that escalate from surgical strikes to geopolitical powder kegs, including a plot to assassinate a rogue agency director amid the volatile shift to democracy. The film’s visual language is intoxicating: cinematographer Thierry Arbogast captures the contrast between the kaleidoscopic flash of fashion weeks—neon lights, swirling fabrics, adoring crowds—and the muted menace of safe houses and interrogation cells, where shadows swallow secrets whole. Éric Serra’s pulsating score, with its synth-driven urgency and haunting motifs, underscores the rhythm of pursuit and evasion, evoking a bygone era of analog intrigue.

Besson’s script, a self-contained fever dream of his EuropaCorp empire, leans into themes that resonate with ferocious clarity. Beauty here is no mere ornament but a weapon, Anna’s ethereal allure disarming foes before the blade falls. Betrayal pulses through every alliance, from institutional oaths shattered by bureaucratic whim to personal intimacies weaponized for survival. And revenge simmers as the quiet fire driving Anna’s arc—not crude vengeance, but a calculated reclamation of agency in a patriarchal spy game that chews up and spits out its players. Clocking in with a modest $30 million budget, Anna punched above its weight at the box office, grossing over $31 million globally, buoyed by international appeal and word-of-mouth buzz for its unapologetic pulp energy. Critics were divided—praising its kinetic set pieces while decrying recycled tropes from Besson’s playbook and films like Atomic Blonde or Red Sparrow—but audiences embraced its escapist thrills, awarding it a solid B+ CinemaScore.

In 2025, as streaming wars rage and viewers crave smart, sexy escapism, Anna feels prescient, a reminder of how personal vendettas can topple empires. Its episodic intensity suits binge-watching, with each timeline hop peeling back layers of Anna’s psyche: the wide-eyed recruit, the poised killer, the woman teetering on the edge of liberation. Production trivia adds flavor—filming spanned Belgrade’s brutalist architecture for Moscow scenes, Paris’s iconic boulevards for glamour, and even Guadeloupe’s sun-drenched shores for a pivotal escape—while Besson’s hands-on direction ensured every stunt felt visceral, from hand-to-hand brawls in couture ateliers to rooftop chases under starry skies. Ultimately, Anna isn’t just a spy saga; it’s a seductive siren song about the cost of beauty in a beastly world, where every pose hides a parry, and freedom is the ultimate illusion. Whether you’re a Besson devotee or a newcomer to his neon-noir universe, this tale of a model with a murderer’s grace will leave you questioning every shadow—and every smile.

Actors

Anna‘s ensemble is a veritable who’s who of international talent, but it’s the electric interplay between Oscar winners Cillian Murphy and Helen Mirren that elevates the film from glossy genre fare to a showcase of simmering intensity. Murphy, fresh off his brooding turns in Peaky Blinders and Inception, slips into the role of Leonard “Lenny” Miller with a predatory poise that’s equal parts charmer and chameleon. As the CIA’s sharp-elbowed handler who recruits Anna into double-agent purgatory, Lenny is a man of calculated risks—his piercing blue eyes and clipped Dublin lilt masking a vortex of ambition and isolation. Murphy infuses the character with a coiled sensuality, particularly in scenes where Lenny woos Anna over clandestine dinners, his whispers laced with the thrill of mutual danger. It’s a performance of restraint, where every sidelong glance hints at the heartbreak of loving a ghost, drawing on Murphy’s knack for quiet devastation seen in The Edge of Tomorrow. Critics lauded his chemistry with lead Sasha Luss, noting how Murphy’s Lenny becomes the emotional fulcrum, a foil to Anna’s enigma whose own betrayals reveal the human cost of endless gamesmanship.

Helen Mirren, the Dame herself, commandeers the screen as Olga, the KGB’s iron-fisted enforcer whose cigarette-fueled monologues drip with world-weary authority. Best known for regal poise in The Queen and steely resolve in RED, Mirren here unleashes a vodka-soaked ferocity, transforming Olga into a matriarch of mayhem—part mentor, part monster. Her Olga is a survivor of purges and perestroika, barking orders in a gravelly Russian accent while nursing grudges like old wounds. Mirren’s physicality is masterful: the predatory stalk across briefing rooms, the flicker of reluctant admiration in her eyes during Anna’s triumphs. It’s a role that chews scenery without apology, and Mirren devours it, blending campy flair with profound pathos. As one reviewer quipped, “Mirren turns a chain-smoking spymaster into a force of nature,” her scenes crackling with the weight of institutional betrayal. The duo’s climactic face-off—Mirren’s Olga versus Murphy’s Lenny in a verbal pistol duel over Anna’s fate—is pure theatrical gold, their veteran gravitas grounding the film’s fantastical flourishes.

Anchoring it all is Sasha Luss, a supermodel making her acting debut, who embodies Anna with a haunting blank-slate allure. Discovered by Besson at a Paris fashion week, Luss brings authentic runway poise to the role, her elongated limbs and porcelain features making every kill shot feel like a Vogue editorial gone rogue. Critics were split on her dramatic chops—some found her stoic demeanor aloof, others praised its icy precision—but her physical commitment shines in the balletic fight choreography, choreographed by the team behind John Wick. Luke Evans rounds out the core trio as Alex Tchenkov, the KGB recruiter whose paternal affection for Anna curdles into obsession; Evans (The Hobbit) lends brooding charisma, his Welsh timbre adding warmth to the cold calculus of recruitment.

Supporting players add texture: Alexander Petrov (Attraction) seethes as Vassiliev, the agency’s megalomaniacal director whose downfall fuels the revenge arc; Lera Abova simmers as Maud, Anna’s lover whose vulnerability humanizes the espionage grind. Eric Lamonre, as the French cop sniffing too close, injects comic relief with his bumbling tenacity. Under Besson’s baton, the cast gels into a symphony of suspicion—rehearsals in Paris hotels fostered off-screen bonds that bleed into on-screen tension. Murphy reportedly drew from real CIA memoirs for Lenny’s moral ambiguity, while Mirren channeled archival footage of Soviet operatives for Olga’s unyielding spine. In a cast bloated with eye candy and firepower, it’s the legends’ luminous menace that lingers, proving Anna a glittering showcase where betrayal tastes like champagne and revenge like absinthe.

Plot Twists

Warning: This section contains major spoilers for Anna. If you haven’t seen the film, turn back now—these revelations will shatter its deceptive delights.

Luc Besson’s Anna thrives on misdirection, its non-linear timeline a deliberate feint that lures viewers into a false sense of security before yanking the rug with revelations as sharp as a stiletto. What masquerades as a straightforward assassin origin story morphs into a hall of mirrors, where loyalties flip like switchblades and every alliance is a audition for betrayal. The twists aren’t just plot devices; they’re thematic gut-punches, underscoring the film’s obsession with illusion—beauty as bait, promises as poison, freedom as the cruelest con.

The first major pivot hits midway, reframing Anna’s recruitment not as salvation but as a gilded cage. Flashbacks reveal that her “escape” from abuse was orchestrated: Alex didn’t stumble upon her by chance but targeted her after surveilling her boyfriend’s black-market dealings. The KGB’s offer—five years of kills for a passport to paradise—was bait from the start, with Olga pulling strings to mold Anna into their perfect phantom. This twist retroactively taints early scenes of training montages and tender mentor moments, exposing Alex’s affection as manipulative grooming. It’s a classic Besson sleight-of-hand, using timeline jumps to bury clues in plain sight: a lingering shot of Olga’s knowing smirk during Anna’s oath, now screaming foreshadowing.

Episode-like escalation builds to the double-agent bombshell in the Paris act. After a botched hit leaves Anna exposed, she crosses paths with Lenny at a couture gala—initially a flirtatious meet-cute, but the reveal flips it: Lenny’s been tracking her for months, using their “chance” encounters to groom her as a CIA mole. Anna, ever the opportunist, flips the script, feeding disinformation to both sides while siphoning intel on Vassiliev’s coup plot. The gut-wrench: Maud isn’t just cover; she’s a plant by Olga to test Anna’s resolve, their lesbian romance a honey trap that culminates in a heartbreaking betrayal scene where Maud pulls a gun, only for Anna to disarm her with a whispered confession of real feelings. This interpersonal detonation humanizes Anna’s isolation, turning her supermodel sheen into a suit of armor cracked by genuine vulnerability.

The back half detonates with institutional treachery. Post-Soviet, Vassiliev’s refusal to release Anna isn’t bureaucratic inertia but a personal vendetta—turns out, Anna’s first kill was his lover, a detail buried in redacted files. Enraged, she greenlights a hit on herself via proxies, but the real twist explodes in the Moscow safe house raid: Anna anticipates it, rigging the room with diversions while escaping with Vassiliev’s black book. Lenny, thinking he’s extracted her, whisks her to a CIA exfil, only to learn she’s played him too—planting a tracker that leads to a decoy assassination of Olga’s deputies, framing the KGB for internal purge.

The finale’s triple-twist crescendo is pure Besson bravado, a symphony of faked demises and fractured faiths. Anna orchestrates her “death” using a body double (a nod to her model world’s doppelgangers), staging a fiery car crash witnessed by both agencies. Lenny mourns at a faux funeral, Olga toasts the “traitor’s” end—until Anna resurfaces at a neutral cafe, dossier in hand, demanding mutual assured destruction: release her, or the files expose everyone. Alex arrives as the wild card, gun drawn in jealous fury, but Anna’s anticipated that too, dosing his drink with a paralytic from her training kit. The ultimate gut-punch? Olga’s reluctant mercy. Confronting Anna in a rain-lashed alley, the handler disarms her physically but pauses at the kill shot, murmuring, “You’re me, thirty years ago—too good to waste on their games.” She lets Anna vanish into the Parisian night, a ghost granted grace, but the final frame’s ambiguity lingers: is that freedom, or just the prelude to another web?

These convolutions, while echoing Nikita‘s DNA, land with earned impact, forcing reevaluation of every glance and gambit. Twists like the body-double ruse and Olga’s twist-of-fate empathy elevate Anna beyond schlock, into a meditation on cycles of control. Predictable to cynics, exhilarating to thrill-seekers, they ensure the film’s tagline rings true: you won’t know what’s real until the fade to black.