7 / 10
Official trailer
The Broken Leg
Dominika Egorova is a celebrated prima ballerina at the Bolshoi in Moscow, and her dancing supports her sick mother. During a performance, her partner lands on her leg and shatters it. Her career is over in an instant, and with it, the apartment and medical care the Bolshoi provided. Later, she discovers the injury wasn’t an accident: her partner and a rival dancer arranged it. She finds them together in the showers and beats them both savagely.
Her uncle, Ivan, a senior officer in Russian intelligence, offers her a way out. If she helps him with one small job, seducing a businessman so he can be photographed, the state will keep paying for her mother’s care. The job goes horribly, violently wrong, Dominika witnesses a murder and her uncle gives her a choice: become an intelligence officer, or be killed as a witness.
Francis Lawrence directed it in 2018, from the novel by Jason Matthews, a former CIA officer, and it’s a far colder, darker and harder film than audiences expected from a big studio thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence.
What grabs me about Red Sparrow is how little it cares about being liked. It’s cold, it’s cruel and it never apologizes for either, and I respect a studio thriller that trusts a grown-up audience that far. Lawrence plays a woman who turns every humiliation into a weapon, and watching her do it is the reason this gets a 7 from me.
Sparrow School
Dominika is sent to a secret state school where young men and women are trained as Sparrows, agents who use seduction, psychology and sex to manipulate targets. Charlotte Rampling plays the Matron, a cold, severe headmistress who tells the students their bodies belong to the state and forces them through humiliating exercises in front of each other.
These scenes are deliberately uncomfortable, and they’re the heart of the film’s argument about power. The school strips its students of privacy, dignity and choice, and Dominika fights back the only way she can, by working out what each person wants and using it against them. When a fellow student attacks her, she turns the situation around and humiliates him in front of the class. It’s the moment she learns to fight on the school’s terms. The Matron notices, and so does Moscow.
For Writers
Sparrow School strips its students of dignity and choice, and Dominika learns to fight back by reading exactly what others want. The school’s own training becomes her weapon against it.
A character’s harshest experiences can become the very source of their strength. When a story shows how a character turns their suffering into skill, the reader understands both their pain and their power, and respects them for it.
Show the training, the humiliation and the moment the character first turns it to their advantage. That turning point is where a victim becomes a player. Readers remember the moment a character stops being done to and starts doing, and they’ll follow that character anywhere afterward.
Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika as a woman of cold, controlled fury, in one of her most interesting performances. Dominika rarely shows what she’s really feeling. She’s constantly calculating, reading people and hiding herself, and Lawrence makes that guardedness gripping.
She also commits fully to the film’s harsh physical and emotional demands. The role involves nudity, violence and scenes of abuse, and Lawrence plays them without vanity.
Her Russian accent is inconsistent, and some viewers found her miscast, but the steeliness she brings to the character is convincing. By the end, you believe this woman could outwit two intelligence services at once.
Nate Nash
Joel Edgerton plays Nate Nash, a CIA officer in Budapest who runs a valuable mole inside Russian intelligence. After a botched meeting in Moscow’s Gorky Park, he’s under a cloud, and Dominika is sent to seduce him and uncover the mole’s identity.
Their relationship is the film’s central game, played out in hotel bars, swimming pools and safe houses across Budapest. Each knows the other is a spy, each is trying to recruit the other and neither can be sure whether the other’s feelings are real. Edgerton is solid and likeable, if a little bland, and the film’s constant question, is she really falling for him or playing him, keeps the tension high.
Edgerton is where the film sags for me. Lawrence is playing a woman who’s calculating every breath, and he’s playing a decent fellow from Budapest station, so half their scenes feel like one of them is in a spy thriller and the other wandered in from a romance. I’d have wanted somebody with more danger in him across the table from her.
For Writers
Dominika and Nate each know the other is a spy, and neither can be sure the other’s feelings are real. The romance is also a game of chess.
A relationship where both characters are hiding their true motives creates constant, low-level tension. Every tender moment might be a manipulation, and the reader finds themselves reading every line twice.
Keep the reader uncertain about your characters’ true feelings for as long as you possibly can. The ambiguity drives the story, and the reveal, when it comes, should change how the reader sees every earlier scene. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is exactly what keeps the pages turning late into the night.
The Uncle
Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ivan Egorov, Dominika’s uncle, and he’s chillingly effective: handsome, cold and predatory, with a clear and unhealthy interest in his niece. He looks, deliberately, a good deal like Vladimir Putin, and the resemblance adds a layer of political menace.
Ivan is the man who sold Dominika into this life, and her hatred of him is one of the film’s driving forces. Jeremy Irons also appears as General Korchnoi, a senior Russian officer, and Ciarán Hinds plays another high-ranking official.
The Russian intelligence world is full of old men using young people as tools. Irons, silver-haired and weary, has a lovely late scene with Dominika, two survivors of the system recognizing each other across a table, and the film has few quieter or better moments.
That table scene with Irons is the one I’d point anyone to. Two people used up by the same machine talk quietly, neither of them bothering to pretend anymore, and it does more for me than any of the film’s shocks.
The Torture
Red Sparrow is violent, and one sequence is notorious. A Russian interrogator uses a device to peel the skin from a victim’s leg, strip by strip, and the scene is shown in grim detail. There are also scenes of sexual assault, beatings and murder, and the film doesn’t look away. The brutality is deliberate and carefully placed. The film wants you to understand the cost of this world, and the violence makes the stakes feel real. It will also be too much for many viewers. That’s one reason the film divided audiences so sharply.
Mary-Louise Parker
The film’s best supporting turn is Mary-Louise Parker as Stephanie Boucher, a drunk, anxious American senator’s chief of staff selling classified secrets to the Russians. Her scenes with Dominika in a London hotel are tense and darkly funny, as she tries to negotiate a price while falling apart.
Her fate is sudden and shocking, and it’s one of the moments where the film’s coldness hits hardest. Parker makes a small role memorable, playing a woman who thinks she’s clever enough to get away with betraying her country and discovers, far too late, what kind of people she’s been dealing with.
The Endgame
The final act is a clever double game. Dominika appears to betray Nate, then reveals she’s been working toward something else entirely. Without giving too much away, the climax involves a swap of prisoners, a hidden identity and a long-planned revenge that ties together threads from the whole film.
The resolution is satisfying and bleak, and it confirms Dominika as a player who’s been several steps ahead of everyone, including the audience. The film’s last scene, a phone call and a piece of Grieg, is quiet and haunting.
For Writers
Dominika’s endgame reveals she’s been planning her revenge all along. She’s been several moves ahead of everyone, including the audience, for the entire film.
A protagonist who’s secretly several steps ahead can produce a thrilling climax, as long as the clues were there all along. The reader should feel outplayed without feeling cheated.
Plant your character’s real plan in plain sight, early: a small choice, a strange detail, a moment of apparent weakness that later turns out to be strength. When the plan is revealed, the reader should be able to look back and see it forming. The pleasure of being outplayed depends entirely on knowing the game was fair from the start. There’s more on this in my article on foreshadowing.
A Spy Wrote It
Jason Matthews spent more than three decades in the CIA’s operations directorate before writing the novel, and his experience fills the story: the tradecraft, the safe houses, the surveillance routines and the constant, grinding suspicion. He famously ended each chapter of the book with a recipe for a dish mentioned in it.
The film drops the recipes, and a lot of the book’s detail, but it keeps its cold, procedural feel. This is espionage as a grim, patient job, full of waiting, lying and fear, and very far from the glamour of Bond.
Lawrence and Lawrence
The film reunited Jennifer Lawrence with director Francis Lawrence, no relation, who’d made the last three Hunger Games films with her. Red Sparrow is a deliberate break from that franchise: an R-rated, adult film that asked its star to go to much darker places.
The collaboration clearly gave Jennifer Lawrence the trust to take on a very demanding role. She trained for months to handle the ballet scenes, and the opening performance at the Bolshoi, intercut with Nate’s botched meeting in Gorky Park, is elegantly staged.
Grey Cities
Nearly every scene unfolds in grey, wintry European cities: Moscow, Budapest, Vienna and London. Jo Willems’s cinematography keeps the colors cold and muted, and the settings feel like the Cold War never ended: dim hotels, empty embassies, rainy streets and people watching from parked cars.
James Newton Howard’s score is elegant and restrained, full of strings and piano, with a classical touch that echoes Dominika’s life as a dancer.
A Spy Thriller That Fooled Me
I really enjoyed Red Sparrow. It’s a difficult watch, because there’s a lot of violence in it and a lot of manipulation. But that’s part of spying, and it makes for a great spy thriller. A film about intelligence officers that shied away from cruelty and deceit would be lying to you. The performances are good across the board. The story makes sense. That isn’t something you can say about every spy film with this many double-crosses. The character arcs are good, Dominika’s above all, and they pay off.
And the ending surprised me. I’ve watched so many movies that I can usually figure one out within the first five minutes and know how it’s going to end. Red Sparrow’s ending was believable and interesting, and it wasn’t what I expected. That’s rare, and it made Red Sparrow a cool movie to watch.
Long and Cold
At well over two hours, Red Sparrow is long, and it drags in places. The plot is complicated and demands close, patient attention, the romance is chilly and the film’s relentless grimness can be exhausting. Some critics dismissed it as exploitative, and its box office was only modest.
But it’s a serious, adult spy thriller in the tradition of Le Carré more than Bond, with a strong, morally complicated heroine. It’s better than its reputation, and it rewards patience. Anyone who enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or The Americans will find plenty here, alongside a much harder, bloodier edge.
Craft Note
Craft Note
This film turns an espionage thriller into a study of power and survival, following a woman who learns to use the system that exploits her against the people running it.
A protagonist who survives by becoming what the system made her can be compelling, especially when she turns its tools against its masters. If your character is trapped in a brutal system, show how they learn its rules, and let them win by using those rules better than anyone else.
The Sparrow’s Game
I give Red Sparrow a 7 because it’s a smart, adult spy film with a lead who deserves every inch of her revenge, and I had a good time with it even when it made me wince.
Lawrence is steely, the Sparrow School scenes are nasty in the right way, and the endgame is a double game that plays fair. What keeps it from an 8 is the length, a middle that drags and a romance that runs cold. It’s still far better than its reputation, and I didn’t see the ending coming.
If the tradecraft interests you, my conversation with Jack Barsky is worth your time. He was a real KGB sleeper agent who lived undercover in America for years, and he talks about what that life taught him about trust.
