Red Spar­row

If Atom­ic Blonde answered chiefly to the John Wick series and Kraftwerk music videos for its influ­ences, this lat­est exer­cise in retro-styled post-Cold War bru­tal­i­ty bor­rows its palette and glacial pac­ing in the para­noid and beige likes of The Rus­sia House, No Way Out and The Fourth Pro­to­col. With that som­bre tone estab­lished, Red Spar­row, a res­olute­ly self-seri­ous and severe film from direc­tor Fran­cis Lawrence, sets its stakes high from the start and only rais­es them from there.

Jen­nifer Lawrence plays Domini­ka Egoro­va, a pri­ma bal­le­ri­na at the Bol­shoi whose career is end­ed when her dance part­ner (played by real-life dancer Sergei Pol­unin) lands on her leg and breaks it. The vio­lence of this scene feels cooly sadis­tic, but the film is care­ful­ly con­struct­ed to jus­ti­fy every bru­tal moment. In this instance, Dominika’s bro­ken leg turns out to be no acci­dent: her dance part­ner and his girl­friend planned the attack in order to retire Domini­ka. Accord­ing to the rules of this dog-eat-dog world, the ex-ballerina’s sadis­tic ret­ri­bu­tion is fair game.

Domini­ka is tipped off on her dance partner’s cul­pa­bil­i­ty by her slip­pery uncle Ivan Egorov (Matthias Schoe­naerts, going full Putin), who works for a shady Russ­ian spy organ­i­sa­tion. In exchange for this small ser­vice, and in order to get some mon­ey to pay her sick­ly mother’s med­ical bills, she agrees to car­ry out a seem­ing­ly small task for him: seduce a man in a hotel and switch his phone for a bugged one. The inci­dent esca­lates and the man has the time to rape Domini­ka before a Russ­ian spy arrives fash­ion­ably late and kills him in the mid­dle of the attack.

Through­out the film, the bal­ance of pow­er is always unfair­ly tilt­ed against Domini­ka. She is put through the most gru­elling ordeals, but it seems that no amount of pay­back will bring an end to her suf­fer­ing. Hav­ing done exact­ly what her uncle asks of her, Domini­ka finds her­self back up against the wall, forced to choose between dying because she’s seen too much, or becom­ing a spy herself.

Once again, the film finds a way to super­fi­cial­ly jus­ti­fy misog­y­nis­tic vio­lence and tor­ture by char­ac­ter­is­ing the world of Russ­ian spies – if not Rus­sia as a whole – as a deeply sex­ist envi­ron­ment where women are con­sis­tent­ly under­mined. This most clear­ly evi­dent in the spy school where Domini­ka is sent to become a ​‘Spar­row’, a spe­cial agent trained to give sub­jects what they want in order to extract infor­ma­tion from them.

Led by Char­lotte Ram­pling at her vil­lain­ous best as a sort of kinky ex-KGB matron, most of the lessons taught at the school are not about fight­ing sex­ism but exploit­ing it, with Spar­rows expect­ed to sac­ri­fice their body for the greater cause. But Domini­ka does not yield to the prin­ci­ples of ​“whore school”, as she calls it. Instead, she is tempt­ed to become a mole for the Amer­i­cans, who, in the fig­ure of Joel Edgerton’s lov­ing Nate Nash, treat her with much more respect.

This is a cyn­i­cal and schemat­ic film in which all the pieces fit neat­ly togeth­er, but its slick struc­ture fails to account for the more com­plex and unsta­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences of sex­u­al vio­lence. A scene in which Domini­ka explains the pow­er play behind rape is accu­rate – but it’s not enough. The order­ly, slick nature of the film ulti­mate­ly makes it hard to con­nect with and feel for Domini­ka. Which is dis­turb­ing, con­sid­er­ing every­thing she goes through. It’s a film that leaves us with a gnaw­ing sense that the real prob­lem remains hang­ing in the air, unresolved.