Originally published March 3, 2018 on FrontRowCentral.com
The most frustrating films are the ones that leave you feeling utterly indifferent. For all the craft and care that goes into delivering a hard-edged spy thriller, Red Sparrow is a film where the thrills seems to stop the moment the actual plot kicks in. It’s closer in style and tone to the novels of John le Carré, but is so spare in its plotting that you find yourself waiting for literally anything to happen next. That’s a shame, because Red Sparrow features an absolutely fierce performance from Jennifer Lawrence. In a film that’s almost punishingly exploitative, there’s little else for us to latch onto here.
Lawrence plays Dominika, a dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. After an onstage accident forces her out of the Ballet, Dominika turns to her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts) to help pay her ailing mother’s medical expenses. Ivan sends Dominika to train to become a Sparrow, Russian spies who acquire intelligence by romantically seducing their targets. Her first official assignment finds Dominika in Budapest, where she gains the trust of an American agent named Nash (Joel Edgerton), who knows the identity of a mole in the Russian military.
Crosses and double-crosses abound in the back half of the plot, and there might even be a triple-cross or two going on as well. It gets hard to tell after a while. As Dominika becomes further and further entrenched in this game of espionage, her survival instinct kicks in and she seems to switch sides out of pure self-preservation. And then she does it again. And just when we think we know this character, she reveals her true intentions, and after a certain point we lose track of whose side she’s even on anymore.
It’s established early that a sparrow is trained to earn their mark’s trust by giving them exactly what they want. As the Matron of the Sparrow School (Charlotte Rampling) explains, this often means submitting sexually to their intended target. Dominika balks at this, at first beating a fellow cadet after an attempted rape, then mocking him to his face when the Matron forces her to submit to the same cadet in front of the whole class. Dominika realizes it’s not the sexual satisfaction these men are after; it’s the power dynamic. The lesson still stands; give your target what they want in order to get what you want. Sex, power, lies; for a sparrow it’s all the same.
This, incidentally, was the very sequence where my theater had a whole bunch of walkouts. The female empowerment and sexual exploitation go hand in hand in this film, and the way it comingles the two is… well, ‘icky’ doesn’t quite cover it. The violence is brutal, the sexual situations are distressing, and it’s all done in the name of hardening a character who already seems fairly tough as we first meet her.
Lawrence’s character is one of the top ballerinas in a Russia that seems ready and willing to reignite the Cold War. With a deceased father and an ailing mother, the film suggests that Dominika is already as tough as she needs to be long before having her constitution tested by Sparrow School. Anything more would just be torture, which is precisely what much of this film feels like; emotional, militaristic torture porn. It’s all couched in the form of a methodical spy thriller, but that only serves to make the moments of brutality stick out like a freshly exposed tibia. Jennifer Lawrence puts herself through the wringer in this role, and comes out the other side like the only cast member not trapped in generic spy movie pablum. Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons are not so lucky.
By the way, Jeremy Irons is in this movie, and if my mentioning that feels like an afterthought, that’s precisely how his inclusion in the film feels. Like an afterthought. Jeremy Irons. He is completely wasted in this film, and fittingly enough, the last time we see him is when he’s sitting at home in his favorite chair, getting completely wasted. I’m sure he brought a little bit of his Alfred Pennyworth to the part.
The bottom line on Red Sparrow is not pretty. Francis Lawrence directs this story with few unique visual flourishes—particularly when conflating Dominika the dancer with Dominika the spy—but the moment the plot moves to Budapest, the whole thing goes on autopilot. There is a statement to be made here regarding feminine agency and sexual power dynamics, but this film still sees those things as excuses for shocking its audience. It’s neither as trashy as it wants to be, nor as high-minded as it thinks it is. With the #MeToo movement in full swing and Russian intelligence in the news 24/7 lately, Red Sparrow just plain feels like the wrong movie at the wrong time. There’s too much to unpack here, presented in a package that hardly feels worth unpacking.
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