Julia Gar­ner scams her way to the top in Invent­ing Anna

The true crime phe­nom­e­non has tak­en the world by storm, fill­ing the world with gris­ly tales of peo­ple (usu­al­ly women) meet­ing vio­lent ends. Unsolved mur­ders are poured over, Red­dit threads share the­o­ries, and mur­der scene pho­tos are exam­ined by hard­core afi­ciona­dos. But for the faint of heart among us, there is a milder alter­na­tive, the scam artist. The art of the scam is just as inter­est­ing but far less har­row­ing alter­na­tive to ser­i­al killer biopics, there is the sto­ry of Rudy Kur­ni­awan, who sold bil­lion­aires bot­tles of ​“fine wine” he mixed in his bath­tub, or Bil­ly McFar­land, who cre­at­ed Fyre Fest where peo­ple expect­ing to par­ty with the Hadid sis­ters found them­selves in FEMA tents with sweaty cheese sandwiches.

What made these crimes fun was the low stakes and schaden­freude at some of the world’s wealth­i­est peo­ple being conned. This also applied to the sto­ry of Anna Sorokin/​Anna Delvey, a young Russ­ian woman who con­vinced New York’s elite she was Ger­man Heiress and got extend­ed stays in lux­u­ry hotels, weeks on yachts, trips on pri­vate jets and almost secured $40,000,000 in invest­ment in The Anna Delvey Foun­da­tion, a pri­vate mem­bers club so exclu­sive it would eclipse Soho House.

Shon­da Rhimes pur­chased the rights to a pro­file of Delvey writ­ten in New York Mag­a­zine by jour­nal­ist Jes­si­ca Pressler, as well as buy­ing the life rights direct­ly from Anna (who was legal­ly oblig­at­ed to use it to pay resti­tu­tion to two banks). The nine-episode Net­flix series is told through jour­nal­ist Vivian’s (based on Jes­si­ca) per­spec­tive, who is preg­nant and being side-lined by her edi­tors. See­ing the poten­tial for a big sto­ry, she begins vis­it­ing Anna at the noto­ri­ous Rik­ers Island prison, where she is await­ing trial.

Anna is played by Julia Gar­ner, best known for Ozark and a dev­as­tat­ing turn in The Assis­tant, and she keeps Anna mer­cu­r­ial, at times obnox­ious and detached, and at oth­ers’ vul­ner­a­ble and endear­ing. As Anna works her way through New York soci­ety she con­tin­u­al­ly rein­vents her­self, resem­bling Eliz­a­beth Holmes when seek­ing invest­ment and a Kar­dashi­an when try­ing to increase engage­ment for her social media, but what remains is Anna’s abil­i­ty to draw peo­ple into her world, to con­vince them of her innate worth and leave them fas­ci­nat­ed by her. Julia Gar­ner capa­bly accom­plish­es this and keeps laser focussed on her through­out, fas­ci­nat­ed by every smirk or raised eye­brow that breaks her icy façade. But while sound­ing like a Russ­ian woman pre­tend­ing to be Ger­man doesn’t sound like the eas­i­est task, what Gar­ner comes up with joins Jared Leto in House of Guc­ci and Oscar Isaac in Moon Knight as a tru­ly cursed accent. Just when you feel you set­tle into a rhythm with the voice com­ing out of her mouth, a few sen­tences that sound straight from a Swedish fjord or a Louisiana bay­ou appear to throw things off again.

Accent aside, the series has all the hyper-com­pe­tence and pol­ish that one would expect from a Shon­da­land prop­er­ty. The styling is a lit­tle flat, giv­en how appear­ance-con­scious many of the char­ac­ters are meant to be, but it still feels con­vinc­ing­ly expen­sive. And Anna is always sur­round­ed by expen­sive things, as the first few episodes take us through peo­ple she uses as step­ping stones on her ascent includ­ing her painful­ly bland futur­ist boyfriend Chase (Saamer Usmani), jad­ed lawyers, obnox­ious tech bros, bored heiress­es, and a delight­ful­ly spikey Man­hat­tan socialite Nora (Kate Bur­ton). All these char­ac­ters are loath­some, and even with Anna’s unscrupu­lous meth­ods it’s impos­si­ble not to root for her, but the per­for­mances have strange tonal shifts, with many of the actors going for a comedic lev­i­ty which jars against those seem­ing­ly reach­ing for some­thing more sincere.

Where the tone entire­ly changes is in the 2^nd half infa­mous trip to Moroc­co, famous­ly the sub­ject of a Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle where her ​“friend” Rachel detailed being tak­en away on a lux­u­ry vaca­tion to Mar­rakech only to be stuck putting the $60k bill on her com­pa­ny cred­it card. Of all the scams this should elic­it the most sym­pa­thy but instead Invent­ing Anna paints Rachel as just as slip­pery as her oth­er sup­posed ​“vic­tims” and one will­ing to milk Anna, both pre and post-incar­cer­a­tion, for as much as she can squeeze out of her.

In the end, Invent­ing Anna posits that no one is inno­cent, Anna Delvey may have been an amoral dam­aged woman but she was play­ing the same game every­one else was. Her friends, lawyer and even Vivian, who pur­ports to have jour­nal­is­tic and moral integri­ty, all prof­it from her, rais­ing their pro­files, and earn­ing huge amounts of mon­ey off the back of her actions. Watch­ing the series begins to feel like a com­plic­it act, as Shon­da Rhimes and Net­flix make mil­lions from her sto­ry, while Anna Delvey her­self cur­rent­ly sits in an ICE facil­i­ty await­ing depor­ta­tion. The joy and tit­il­la­tion of watch­ing her scam the rich and pow­er­ful is taint­ed by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the con­tent that prof­its from her mis­ery, some­thing that seems far more odi­ous than charg­ing the odd Birkin to someone’s Bergdorf account.