Red sparrow movie#

He will keep her afloat, as long as she agrees to carry out a mission.įor a relatively traditional spy thriller, “Red Sparrow” is more up-to-the-minute than it looks - more so, even, than the filmmakers must have known when they were making it.

It’s a dread-ridden slipping-out-of-the-middle-class scenario, and it spurs her to take up the offer of her uncle, Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts, gleaming like Vladimir Putin’s bureaucrat-sociopath son), who happens to be the deputy director of Russia’s external intelligence agency, the SVR. But as soon as her dancing days end, she learns that she’s going to be stripped of her health insurance and the apartment. To Western eyes, Dominika lives in a very modest flat, which she shares with her mother (Joely Richardson), whom she’s devoted to taking care of. We also learn that when her fury flies, there will be blood. It’s here that she confronts what it means to be a pawn in the ruthless new Russian state (the same, it seems, as the old state). But her career is cut short by a horrific on-stage collision (not an accident, as we soon discover). Dominika starts off as a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet, dancing before the glitterati of Moscow in a costume of resplendent red and gold.

Red sparrow movie#

The movie is a thriller, but it’s also a kind of sexualized nightmare, and that’s the boldness of it. operative) that taps the audience’s intelligence rather than insulting it, “Red Sparrow” presents Lawrence’s character, Dominika Egorova, as a victim who is cast into a state of peril she has to dig her way out of, one ominous chess move at a time. Even when (of course) we’re being played.ĭirected by Francis Lawrence, who made the last three “Hunger Games” films, working from a script by Justin Haythe (based on the 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, a former C.I.A. We’re on her side, but more than that we’re in her head. She plays a spy as someone who acts out a role, but does so (paradoxically) by acting as little as possible she cues each scene to a different mood, leaving the audience in a constant state of discovery. In the elegantly tense and absorbing “ Red Sparrow,” on the other hand, Jennifer Lawrence portrays a Russian spy who’s a cunningly desperate human being - or, at least, enough of one that each scene rotates around the choices she makes, the way she appraises and seizes the destiny of the moment. Lawrence, in this movie, shows you what true screen stardom is all about.

They’re slickly “empowered” women, yet it’s hard to distinguish that power from the thriller-video decadence of 21st-century action filmmaking. In pumped-up espionage potboilers like “Atomic Blonde” or “Salt,” Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie have gone through the motions of imitating male action stars at their most kick-ass grandiose.