Haley Adams

English 160

Section 001

Unit 2 Film Review Micro #1

The film Red Sparrow, written by Justin Haythe and directed by Francis Lawrence

depicts a young woman battling the hardships of being controlled and abused by men of power.

The movie takes place in modern-day Russia (2018 when the film was published). The

protagonist of the film is beautiful Dominika Egorova. She is a famous ballerina who

emotionally and financially supports her mother who is ill. After her career as a ballerina ended

because of an injury, Dominika’s uncle, Ivan, proposed to her a job working as a spy for the

SVR (Russian Intelligence Service). Her uncle held the truth from her, that she was going to be

used and objectified as a sexual prompt to get information from the SVR’s prospects. In her first

job he gives her, she is brutally raped by the man she is trying to steal information from. Later,

we find out that her uncle knew she would be raped but forced her to do it anyways. Instead of

letting her go, he says she needs to go to “Sparrow School”, and keep working for them, or she

will be killed.

Dominika faces a lot of abuse from the men that she works for, and the administrators at

the school she attends. This movie was made to be feminist and empowering to the women

viewers. Dominika eventually learned how to regain power over her mail colleges and men in

general. The film wants to push empowerment, but it does so through a thick filter of misogyny.

There are many details in the filming of the movie that are not needed to portray the main idea.

The film is shot through the male gaze; it hypersexualizes female bodies regardless of context
during the scenes of the film. Even the camera fixates on the certain curves of Dominika’s body,

going as far as to cut the heads off of women in the background of multiple camera shots.

Dominique regains her power by using her sexuality to win. She uses the notion of

misogyny (sexualizing and objectifying women) as her force of power to manipulate men into

doing what she wants them to do. This ends up good for her in the end, but there are many ways

that the film does not support other feminist ideals. During her stay at The Sparrow School, the

students are taught how to get men to do what they want them to get secret information. Most of

this is done by using the student’s sexual power. The part of filming that didn’t make sense was

the disproportionate amount of torture, violence, rape, and nudity of the students that were

women. Why didn’t the film show men using their sexual power and giving themselves up to

men and women to get information? Some women, when they got in trouble, had to come to the

front of the class and strip naked, have sex, or perform other sexual activities. Why did this never

happen to the men in the school?

While in the showers at the Sparrow School, Dominika gets approached by one of her

male peers. He tries to rape her, and she physically fights him back and hurts him in the process.

Instead of the school punishing him, they punished Dominika for fighting for herself; they were

confused about why she did not let him rape her. To punish her, during class, she had to come up

to the front of the class, get undressed, and let him have sex with her. She messed with his head

before the fact, and he could not have sex with her anymore. This was an empowering scene

because it showed that even when she was completely naked and being taken advantage of, she

kept her power.

There is a torture scene when SVR punishes Dominika for their suspicion that she was

working with the Americans. In men’s torture scenes, they are not naked or sexualized. But with
women, the film shows every detail. In her torture scene, her chest is strapped into a version of a

push-up bra. This makes it so that her breast dominates the screen. This scene is supposed to be

the hardest experience that Dominika has to go through, and it is unnecessary to sexualize her

physical torture. It also sexualizes violence in this movie. In her torture scene, and in the porn the

students were forced to watch, it was all extremely violent.

Women in this film, apart from the SVR, are treated as objects to be looked at,

sexualized, admired, and controlled. It depicts one of the highest forms of sexualizing women

within a patriarchy. Men have all of the power in this society. A quote from the film, “In my

country, if you don’t matter to men in power then you don’t matter.” This was true. Even in

Dominika’s case, to gain power, she had to make herself matter to the men in power. Even in one

of the first scenes, Dominika’s costar ballet dancer breaks her leg so that he can give another

woman Dominika’s role. When he does this, he gets rewarded with that woman having sex with

him. This foreshadows women getting what they want, and men only caring about sex.

In addition to gender differences, there are also differences in social class and how they

are treated. The only reason Dominika said yes to doing this job was to make money for her ill

mother. This connects to how in today’s society, one of the ways for lower-class women to

achieve good money can be in the form of prostitution. Because of this, these lower-class women

can fall victim to more violence and danger, when all they want is to support themselves

financially.

Many scenes in the film also depict how women are treated in the business world. The

SVR wasn’t exactly a business corporation type, but the relationships between male and female

employees stayed the same. Dominika was told that she would do better in her job if she would

sleep with her boss. This happens more in modern-day society then imagined. Especially in the
school, next to her peers, women were the ones blamed and punished for most things. In one of

the last scenes, when Dominika knows the information to give to the boss, she tells a man below

him that she needs to talk to him. The man tries to talk her into telling him the information s that

he can tell the boss himself. This is another example in a business where men can try to steal

women’s ideas and work.

When it comes to power in this film, men have it all. Dominika was treated terribly

throughout her life by men but eventually learned how to use their patriarchal mindsets against

them. This film has its setbacks, mainly coming from the film’s male perspective and gruesome

details of violence toward women. In addition, it demonstrates the empowered woman pushing

past society's boundaries of patriarchy and regaining her power over the men who wronged her

in her life.