Inventing Anna arrives on Netflix on February 11 – here’s our spoiler-free review.
After showrunner supreme Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix debut, Bridgerton, broke all kinds of records, her follow-up for the streamer has been eagerly anticipated, and Inventing Anna arrives on Friday (February 11), with all nine episodes dropping on day one. The series is a retelling of the true story of fraudster Anna Sorokin, a young woman who, posing as Anna Delvey, managed to fool some of New York’s brightest and richest people into thinking she was a wealthy heiress with a fortune of $60 million and plans to set up a charitable foundation. Before her true identity came to light, she had managed to enjoy, but not pay for, stays in expensive hotels, trips on a private jet, and an awful lot of clothes, drinks and lavish dinners, running up a tab of more than $200,000. Perhaps inevitably Delvey/Sorokin was eventually exposed, but not before some a good deal of drama. The process of bringing the story to the screen wasn’t without some dramas of its own, with Sorokin having to go to court to win the right to sell her story to Netflix. If you want to read more about the background to Inventing Anna, and about what became of Sorokin, we’ve gone into more detail in this feature. But, if you’re wondering if you should dive into this intriguing new drama then you’ve come to the right place – read on for our Inventing Anna review… Inventing Anna is adapted from Jessica Pressler’s 2019 article for New York magazine How Anna (Sorokin) Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People. To tell the story of Delvey/Sorokin’s rise and fall, the nine-parter largely follows Vivian Kent, a fictionalized version of Pressler. A journalist whose career is in the toilet after a fake news scandal, Kent attempts to resurrect her career by pursuing Sorokin, and trying to piece together the story of how this young woman managed to take so many of New York’s aristocracy for a ride. We follow Kent as she meets the people Delvey met, befriended and conned, as well as making numerous visits to see Sorokin herself in prison, before the story moves to the courts as the ‘Soho Grifter’, as Delvey came to be known, faces the full force of the law. There’s a rich history of con-men and con-women on screen, and, if you look at all the best-known examples, there’s a key factor they have in common.
