Review: Red Sparrow

Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is the prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet until an on-stage accident (note: not an accident) ends her career. Her options to support her ill mother (Joely Richardson) rapidly narrow; working for her sleazy security chief uncle (an extremely Putin-like Matthias Schoenaerts) becomes the only way to keep from being thrown out onto the street.

Of course, once she agrees to his offer she’s dropped into a nightmare where the only way to stay alive is to become a Sparrow, a spy trained to use sex as a weapon against the enemies of the state – enemies like CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who’s been booted out of Russia for blowing his cover. Nate is a spy who cares too much, and when the high level mole he was handling won’t make contact with anyone else he’s sent back to Europe to re-establish contact – and Dominika is sent to “make contact” with him.  

You're seeing this for Jennifer Lawrence, and fortunately she's excellent here. Unfortunately, she’s playing a blank slate, so while she constantly and skilfully suggests that something’s going on under the surface, she can’t make clear what that is - for the plot to work her character has to be a cypher. If we knew how she was feeling beyond “I’m under duress”, then we’d know what she was thinking, and as the entire film is building to the kind of shock reveal supposedly gritty and realistic spy movies love, this can’t happen.

That wouldn’t matter if the film – like last year’s Atomic Blonde – provided surface pleasures like snappy dialogue and exciting action. But Red Sparrow features no shoot-outs, no car chases, and surprisingly for a film whose lead was originally a ballerina, no scenes where Dominika kicks someone in the face.

Instead of action, this has is sex – or as the rating warns us, “sexualised violence”. Remember the gritty realism mentioned earlier? That’s the frequently rapey sex scenes. But the realism only goes so far: this is a film that features what Dominika memorably refers to as “whore school”, which is so hilariously lurid the presence of Charlotte Rampling as the head mistress must be some kind of in-joke.

The fact that Dominika gets sent on a mission without graduating (and isn’t much of a student) suggests that even the film knows the sex school is a silly idea. If the Russian secret service is so all-encompassing that it can make anyone its servant, why don’t they just hire conventionally attractive women who enjoy sex to staff their Sparrow team? Why do spies need to be sent to a special school to learn how to pick up drunken lonely diplomats anyway? Nobody sent James Bond to sex school -  unless it was to learn how to track down women with absurdly suggestive names.

In a smarter film, this could be a critique of the usual spy clichés. For men, spy sex is fun; for women, it’s a tool of oppression – she’s bluntly told at Whore School that her body belongs to the state. But Dominika is such a blank we have no idea what any of it means to her as a person. She's trained to become a sex spy, but the film has zero interest in her personal attitudes to sex beyond a fairly universal distaste for being raped then having her rapist murdered while on top of her. Is this former top athlete liberated by her training, enjoying her new role as a sexual aggressor? When she uses her naked body to show that a would-be rapist she beat up was more interested in power than sex, is this something new to her or something she knew all along?

It’s not until past the half way mark that she gets to have a sex scene that isn’t on-the-job rape, and by then we’re expected to wonder if she’s not merely using sex to get what she wants. In Red Sparrow, good sex is about emotional connection, while bad sex is about power and manipulation; if we could make a connection with Lawrence’s character maybe this wouldn’t be such a dud root.

Anthony Morris