The more extravagantly famous you are, the less extravagantly controversial you have to be to get the internet riled and divided over you regardless. So proves Jennifer Lawrence’s laundry list of apparent provocations over the last two weeks, with unseemly acres of tweetage given over to the fact that she a) wore a dress outdoors; b) never finished watching Phantom Thread; and c) briskly rejected Bafta host Joanna Lumley’s claim that Lawrence is “the hottest actress on the planet”.

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These were miniature tinderbox fusses, of course, merely priming the outrage machine for the firestorm of d) releasing Red Sparrow, an icy spy thriller fuelled by extreme sexual violence, that would have seemed laboratory-tooled to generate as many seething journalistic hot takes as possible even if it hadn’t been released into the long, freezing winter of #MeToo. Five years ago, she klutzily tripped over her puffy pink princess gown while accepting an Oscar for a peppy indie romcom, and audiences watched with bursting hearts in their eyes. What a long time five years is.

It’s especially long when you’re in your 20s. Lawrence was 22 then and is 27 now, and anyone with even a passing memory of that formative decade in their lives knows what a night-and-day divide lies between those ages – it’s just harder to parse for a movie star who lives every day of that transition under a camera’s scrutiny. Let’s not get into leering tabloid terminology here: Lawrence is as “all grown up” now, baring flesh and enduring all manner of sadistic patriarchal punishment as a Bolshoi ballerina turned Russian intelligence officer, as she was when she nobly volunteered as tribute for The Hunger Games series. But the actress’s screen image, underpinned since her 2010 breakthrough in Winter’s Bone by a kind of flinty, no-bullshit resilience, has undergone a subtle shift in the interim. The flintiness remains, but so has a degree of cool reserve and sexualised confidence – a hard-won realisation, perhaps, that the earthy, dorky everygirl persona wins you more fans than it does privacy.

That’s all up on screen in Red Sparrow, along with any amount of queasily eye-popping bodily exposure and abuse. In her forcible education as a secret agent, Lawrence’s character Dominika Egorova is taught to use her body as her primary investigative resource. After ensnaring a suspect politician by subjecting herself to rape, she’s deemed suitably qualified for the Red Sparrow academy – “whore school”, as Dominika dismissively calls it – where an elite selection of exclusively attractive aspiring spies are trained in the art of submissive sexual manipulation by no less than a nipple-fiddling Charlotte Rampling herself.

As sex-is-power schemes go, this is neither particularly sexy nor especially empowering: Red Sparrow is instead a nihilistic story of joining a system of female exploitation that won’t let you beat it, and doing your best to come out alive. It’s a story that, for better or worse, feels grimly tuned into Hollywood’s current crisis of gender politics, and Lawrence, her slip-sliding Raw-shun accent notwithstanding, sells the unseasonably frosty hell out of it. Whether bloodily thrashing unsuspecting victims in a shower room or putting her body out as bait in the most complicatedly engineered swimsuit cinema has yet seen, she’s stoically riveting to watch – an actress herself fully schooled in the power of her physical presence.

It’s no surprise that critics are divided over the question of just how complicit Red Sparrow is in the grotesque system of sexual subjugation it depicts. “More interested in women’s bodies than in their experiences,” scoffed Slate’s Inkoo Kang of the “off the mark” film, while Uproxx’s Amy Nicholson defended what she saw as the film’s morally conscious perversity: “[It] refuses to let us leer at Jennifer Lawrence’s long legs without a jab of shame.” Another sidebar of criticism questions Lawrence’s very autonomy in making the film to begin with, positing the actress as a kind of doll being bent into compromising positions by her male industry superiors. “It’s hard not to think she is losing some battles here,” speculated Jonathan Dean for GQ, casting doubt on Lawrence’s repeated assertions in interviews that she chose to do the film as an act of self-empowerment, claiming control over her body and its exposure after a much-publicised leak of private nudes in 2014 left her feeling violated and powerless.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jennifer Lawrence in Mother! Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Paramount Pictures

This is tricky territory: there’s a line between questioning an artist’s judgment and doubting their creative agency, and it’s one crossed far more often with regard to women than to men. Has the sleek sleaze of Red Sparrow backfired on Lawrence’s feminist motivation for making it? You could argue the point either way, but it seems unconstructive to deny her full credit for consciously taking the risk to begin with – just as she did with last year’s aggressively polarising Mother!, her ex-boyfriend Darren Aronofsky’s baroquely metaphorical study of women cyclically tortured by the male creative ego. (It’s funny that she recently, contentiously admitted to only making it through three minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s warped fashion-world romance Phantom Thread: it’s practically Mother!’s better-behaved twin.) Mother! is the gutsiest film she’s yet made (and yielded possibly her most finely shaded performance to date), yet some of the film’s most virulent detractors described Lawrence as its victim – conflating the young actor with the brutally exploited ingenue she cannily played in it.

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This kind of criticism extended to last week’s absurd media brouhaha over Lawrence’s decision to wear a bare-shouldered, cut-to-there Versace gown for a minutes-long outdoor photocall in the London February chill – the contrast between her attire and her male co-stars’ cosier winter garb prompting a spate of incensed commentary against the ingrained Hollywood sexism that would force her to dress this way. Lawrence’s social media rebuttal was curt: she chose the dress, she liked the dress, and if she wanted to be cold to look hot, that was entirely her prerogative. Between the lines, you might read an equivalently defiant defence of her decision to make the similarly skin-baring film she was promoting, though Lawrence herself would probably roll her eyes at the very words “between the lines”: at this point, she’d probably like the courtesy of being taken at her word.

Red Sparrow may not be as artful or bracingly subversive as Mother!, but it’s still a brazenly cold statement of intent for – in the cut-down words of Joanna Lumley – “the hottest actress on the planet” to make. At 27, Lawrence is testing her star quality, seeing how far it can stretch to cover roles and projects (and dresses) that might not seem an obvious fit for the elevated girl nextdoor that much of the media wants her to be.

And why not? She’s already won an Oscar and headlined a megamillion studio franchise. By Hollywood’s standards, nirvana was achieved at the tender age of 22: the right and power to experiment and antagonise was won early, and if we’re uncomfortably flummoxed by her choices, maybe that’s where she wants us, relieving some of the pressure of being universally adored. If Lawrence’s contemporary and near-parallel in the music world is Taylor Swift, perhaps Red Sparrow is her showily abrasive Look What You Made Me Do. The old J-Law can’t come to the phone right now – she’s dead and loving it.