The moderately strong spy thriller, “Red Sparrow” can respectively detach itself from recent years of bland spy-gone-bad flicks for not only its clever twist of originality but for its contradicting use of sexual violence.

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Actress,Jennifer Lawrence is yet again under the direction of Francis Lawrence, who directed two of the three successful films of the trilogy, “The Hunger Games.” This time, however, the dystopian teen-rated brutality is kicked up ten notches, as Jennifer Lawrence’s career takes a much more ballsy direction through an exceptional Russian accent, gritty and torturous violence, and the unpredictable on-screen power of seduction and nudity.

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The plot, as predictable as it might seem due to the overdone recycled stories from forgetful spy films, can appropriately stand on its own to an extent. Lawrence’s character, Dominika, a renowned Russian ballerina is brutally hospitalized after a duet performance turns into a freak accident, which she later discovers was initially planned to ruin her career.

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With the financial stakes of losing her home, along with the healthcare of her sick mother, Dominika seeks aid from her authoritatively perverted uncle, Egorov, (Matthias Schoenaerts) a highly placed espionage official, who coaxes her into attending an elite unit of “Sparrows” where she is trained to master the arts of seduction and psychological manipulation. Meanwhile, an American CIA officer, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), is on a mission to return to Europe, where he is safeguarding a Russian mole he has cultivated into the government.

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Through multiple sequences, Lawrence’s character suffers a heaping plate of sexual violence and rape, but continues to carry out her duties through an emotionally-detached mask in which she molds to establish manipulation and twisted trust through her seduction targets under the command of her uncle. However, the repeated abuse in which her character faces has raised the question whether sexual violence serves as the plot of the storyline.

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Hannah Woodhead, a writer for The Pool, expressed her disgust towards the misinterpretation of the trauma of rape in the film, primarily calling out male filmmakers. Woodhead exemplified the sexual assault and rape scenes that occur within the first hour of the film, claiming these encounters to serve no other purpose than to perpetuate the idea that a woman’s body is her greatest weapon. According to Little White Lies, the lessons taught at the “whore school,” as Dominika herself described it, are not about fighting sexism, but exploiting it, as she is commanded to strip naked in front of her assaulter and fulfill his vulgar intentions. In addition to the sexual violent scenes, Woodhead makes it apparent that even the torturous scenes are shot in a way where Lawrence’s breasts are purposely exposed.

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Due to Dominika’s emotionally detached identity, Woodhead states that these scenes altogether gained no indication of how these horrific events impacted the character. She compares this film with the 2009 film, “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” where the character is brutally raped. Though extremely uncomfortable to watch, Woodhead makes a point to note that this scene gained emotional impact through the character and significant development on the film’s plot, as she learned to deal with her assault. Despite her devilishly sweet revenge on her rapist, the character’s trauma was never laid to rest.

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“Too often, films that include sexual assault as a storyline assume that when the attacker goes away, the pain does, too,” said Woodhead. In the wake and progression of the #MeToo movement, the gender gap in entertainment is witnessed through female-focused films directed by male filmmakers. According to The Pool, in 2016, “Blacklist,” published an article which explained the amount of scripts they received that included rape. Of the 755 scripts, seventy-five percent were written by men and seventy percent were R-rated.

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Lawrence, who has publicly advocated her support for women’s rights and recently, the Time’s Up Movement, has willingly spoken out about her empowering experience of going full nude on-screen during promotional interviews for the film after falling victim of hacking which led to her private photos being leaked on the internet in 2016.

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“The insecurity and fear of being judged for getting nude, what I went through, should that dictate decisions I make for the rest of my life? This movie changed that and I didn’t even realize how important changing that mentality was until it was done,” J-Law said at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. “But I also really challenged myself in ways that I never really had before. The foreign accent. The dancing. It was really taking on a very different leaf.”

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Director, Francis, made it clear in an interview with Variety that he gave Jennifer total artist freedom during filming.

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“She was the first person to see the movie as a whole with those scenes to be able to say ‘I’m with it’ or ‘we need to talk and make some changes.’ And she was totally with it. She didn’t have me pull anything,” Francis said.

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While it is important to note the excessive use of sexual violence of an actress in a film, there’s no denying that both the violent and subtle dialogue scenes attempted to represent the history of sexist culture that has evolved into modern day Russia. The American agent, Nate, is the only ounce of humanity in the entirety of the film, serving as the only male figure to show respect for Dominika, which unveils the only romantic and emotional relationship she develops with a man. Only out of clear desperation and carefully crafted vengeance do we see Dominika go well beyond her breaking points and use her assaults to backfire the humiliation and indecency she experienced. Although her character is sexualized and mistreated, her body counteracts as a weapon to dismantle the twisted minds of her assaulters, using more brains over beauty to seek overdue vengeance and closure from a history of abuse.

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“Red Sparrow,” deserves careful evaluation due to its missing pieces of psychological consequence that sexual assault survivors face long after their experience. Although it’s hard to connect to the trauma in which Dominika feels throughout her abuse, the film successfully molds into not two hours of softcore torture porn, but rather a bold and vivid sexualized nightmare with imperfect barbed edges.