Netflix’s Inventing Anna Early Review

The much awaited Netflix miniseries featuring the incredible true story of Anna Delvey is finally here. With Inventing Anna, uber writer and producer Shonda Rhimes delivers yet another stylish, suspenseful, funny and consistently entertaining series that fits nicely within her Shondaland umbrella.

Inventing Anna of course follows a young conwoman named Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), a German immigrant proclaiming she possessed a trust fund worth nearly sixty million dollars. From there, Delvey managed to con the rich, various law firms, real estate agents, and financial advisors before eventually getting arrested. Meanwhile, a Manhattan reporter named Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) came across her story and wanted to write her own story of how Delvey allegedly tricked multiple city elites. The subsequent dark, love-hate dynamic as Delvey found herself awaiting trial while Kent is pressed to figure out the truth as to who was the real Anna Delvey unfolded like a novel that only got more and more suspenseful as the story went on.

Over the course of her investigation, Kent tracked down and spoke to all the prominent people in Delvey’s life and story from good to bad and all the other people in between. The series essentially took all those respective accounts from the people who knew her, from friends, colleagues, to the people she managed to trick via a series of flashbacks where each recounted their encounters with Delvey and what happened to them as a result. Inventing Anna catered to these various perspectives to their respective personalities as the tone and style of these dramatizations changed based on the person who was recounting them.

That being said, Inventing Anna wasn’t just about Delvey’s fraudulent adventures with New York City’s moneymen but also the process of her creating the persona she used in the process of committing her crimes and its evolution thus inventing herself. Based on Jessica Pressler’s 2019 New York Magazine story, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People,” the series opens with a magazine press followed by slowly unraveling its wild story over its 9 extended episodes. Though the episodes may be long and possess almost feature film length running times, they are still very entertaining to watch. Surely boosted by the vast financial resources of a Netflix, the series does a great job at portraying the many lifestyles of the rich and famous and their lavish natures.

When it came to Garner, it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to anyone to see her shine as Anna Delvey while delivering a very original take on the character. In terms of the supporting performances, boasting the likes of Chlumsky, Laverne Cox, Katie Lowes, Anders Holm, Arian Moayed, Alexis Floyd, Jeff Perry, Anna Deavere Smith, and Terry Kinney, they were all good across the board.

At the end of the day, Inventing Anna delivers a good and unique watch for the most part despite arguably tapering off and becoming less interesting by the end.

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Anmol Pandhi

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