A talent scout for a modelling agency finds his Next Big Thing in a bustling Moscow market. A few weeks later, Anna is a fresh, attractive face in the cut-throat world of Parisian fashion.
A few weeks after that, she guns down her businessman boyfriend in his hotel room.
That Moscow market meeting, you see, was a planned KGB operation to insert one of their agents into a career that gives her access to all kinds of powerful people and sensitive information.
Of course, espionage is an even more cut-throat business than high fashion, and friends can become enemies in an instant. Anna is going to need every skill she's been taught - and perhaps learn a few new ones as well - if she wants to stay alive.
This latest film from Luc Besson feels in some ways rather like his 2014 offering Lucy: you've got a socially-disadvantaged woman more or less press-ganged into a dangerous occupation that leads to her developing the skills and techniques to seize back control of her life.
On the plus side, this film has a lot less nonsense science in it than Lucy did. On the negative, it's got significantly more male gaze, and it is definitely rather too fond of flashbacks as a narrative device. It's easy to deliver 'twists' when you conceal information, but it doesn't deliver genuinely satisfying ones, to my mind.
Anna is stylish and relatively entertaining moment-to-moment, and if you're desperate for some spy hi-jinks, it should scratch that itch. Ultimately though I felt it was a little lacking in real substance.
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