The poster for Red Sparrow.

For a commercial audience — including myself —, director Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow is going to frustrate.

The film is marketed as a mix between an origin story for Marvel’s much-loved-but-apparently-not-worth-a-movie Black Widow character and what 2017’s Atomic Blonde was supposed to be — an exciting, female-driven action film, a la John Wick.

That’s not the film you get.

Red Sparrow focuses on Dominika Egorova, played wonderfully by Jennifer Lawrence (more on her later). Dominika is one of Russia’s finest ballet dancers when her career and comfortable life of stardom is ripped from her due to a gruesome leg break during a performance.

Dominika’s mother is ill, and the daughter will do whatever it takes to provide for her care. Dominika’s uncle enlists her help in a government operation, but she sees something she shouldn’t have seen.

Dominika has two choices: Join something called “Sparrow School,” a breeding ground for Russian operatives trained to use their bodies and sexual prowess as more of a tool than their fists or brains, or die.

Dominika chooses the former.

Red Sparrow is a brutally slow-paced movie, clocking in at a beefy 141 minutes, built more around the sleuthy, espionage side of cold politics than watching Dominika punch her way through her problems. When action does pop up every now and then, it’s violently gruesome. It doesn’t hold anything back. It wants you to see it.

I see the complaints: The movie is too long. The plot leaps over intricate, skips past complex and lands right on downright convoluted. The movie wants to be smarter than it is; it takes you on so many unnecessary twists and turns that when the merry-go-round stops, the movie has no idea where it is.

Most audiences won’t connect with Red Sparrow because of the absolute starkness and brutal honesty of the film’s portrayal of sexual authority. The #MeToo movement has swept the nation, leaving no industry unturned, including — if not focusing on — Hollywood.

Jennifer Lawrence, the film’s star, has been at the center of someone’s sexual misconduct before. Lawrence, most famous for her portrayal of Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games series, was one of 30 celebrities whose private photos were leaked in an Apple iCloud hack in 2014.

In January 2017, Edward Majerczyk was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a fine of $7,500 to a single victim. That didn’t matter. The damage was done.

In an interview on Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in 2017, Lawrence said the hack made her feel like she got—pardon my language; her words, not mine— “gangbanged by the fucking planet.”

“There’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me,” Lawrence said on the podcast. “You can just be at a barbecue, and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.”

As more and more stories come out nearly every day detailing the toxic workplace environments for women in Hollywood, —whether it be Harvey Weinstein’s sexual intimidation, Kevin Spacey’s vile sexual bullying and subsequent nonsensical excuse of being gay, Mira Sorvina’s blacklist, what have you— Red Sparrow felt like JLaw had something to say.

Sparrow School isn’t so much about becoming the female James Bond as it is becoming an exaggerated version of Sharon Stone’s famous scene in Basic Instinct. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s a brutal glance in how the fictional Russian government wants these men and (especially) women to hone their craft.

It’s all about sex. As the film drills into your head, you have to find what your subject wants and fill in that gap. The most common answer is sex, but it’s more nuanced and specific than that. Why are they wanting sex? Did their wife just leave them? Are they just bored?

The most common correct answer is the reason men in Hollywood have felt they have such free reign for the past God-knows-how-many years:

Power.

There is one scene in particular that absolutely needs to be talked about. Throughout the first half of the film, we see JLaw’s character either get assaulted or have an assault attempted on her at least four times. These scenes are harrowing, violent and deserve a legitimate trigger warning.

One of these attempts made on her is from a fellow classmate at Sparrow School who attacks Dominika in the shower. Dominika rips off one of the shower’s knobs and beats the crap out of her attacker, who is essentially banished from the school.

Before he leaves though, Dominika has to profile him, exactly what she’s done with other subjects. Find out what he wants and find the most efficient way to give it to him. It’s the quickest way to get information in the field, right?

Bear in mind this scene — and in turn, its description—can be graphic.

The immediate assumption about an attempted rapist is that his ultimate end goal would be sex. Dominika’s superior orders her to take off her clothes, and upon doing this, her attacker tells her to turn around. Dominika refuses, instead staring him right in the eye. He can’t bring himself to do it.

“Power,” Dominika says as her attacker walks away for the last time, his tail literally between his legs. “He wants power.”

When that power is taken from Dominika’s male attacker, he just stands in front of her, completely shaken to the core and wallowing in helplessness. Francis Lawrence’s direction of this scene is crucial. The camera is at JLaw’s eye-level, and we focus on her eye, the confidence in her face.

In art, the “male gaze” is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “the perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women.”

Dominika’s first hour of Red Sparrow and the past four years of Jennifer Lawrence’s life since her privacy was invaded bare striking similarities. Her sense of comfort was ripped away from her without permission. The actress who has been nominated for four Oscars and won one for her role in Silver Linings Playbook was reduced to a naked body on a screen for the sole purpose of entertaining men she had never met before. For these men, was it about seeing a naked woman? Maybe, but maybe it was also about having the ability to see a naked woman without having to hear her thoughts on the matter, without having to know her fears, desires, hopes and dreams.

Just a naked body on the screen.

But when she is laying on a table naked in front of her rapist who can’t get aroused by a situation in which a woman shares 50/50 control, Dominika —and indeed, Lawrence— are in control of who they are.

When you look the character in the eye during this scene, you can’t help but see the fire in Lawrence’s eye. Dominika disappears, and Jennifer Lawrence remains, staring daggers into the camera as if a direct challenge to all involved in leaking her nudes four years ago.

Dominika spends the rest of the movie outsmarting everyone en route to getting what she wants. What she actually wants, not what some man in a suit working for a shady government tells her to want. And she gets it by being brilliant, which she is. Any sexual encounter that Dominika has from that moment to the finish line is of her own volition.

For so long— not just in Hollywood, but in every walk of life from religion to race to sexuality— women have been the subject of what a man wants to see. In many contemporary forms of popular culture, female characters are pornographic caricatures more than they’re complex human beings with deep-rooted emotional tendencies and passions and goals.

And maybe a movie like Red Sparrow won’t make much of a difference. The characters make dumb choices, and it’s about 20 minutes too long. It’s gruesome, and you probably won’t convince your grandma to go see it. It’s not going to appeal to a mass audience. It’s not a Marvel movie. It didn’t have a huge opening weekend. But if it inspires people, especially young men, to look at women and see power and passion rather than an avenue for exploitation, then Jennifer Lawrence will probably be proud.

And Lawrence’s sheer willpower and bravery through this process cannot be overstated. After being such an integral part of a YA giant like The Hunger Games, Lawrence could’ve coasted by on big roles and mail it in for every milked franchise she was offered a part in. But she takes chances. Look at her last two films: mother! and Red Sparrow. These films were magnificent risks. The sexual liberation and empowerment Lawrence exhibits throughout the final chapter of the latter makes these necessary additions to Lawrence’s filmography because of one very important factor:

It’s what she wants to do.

And that can’t be overstated.