What does the world’s highest-paid female actor do when the franchise that took her to the top ends? It turns out the answers include: take home $20m for starring in an unintentionally creepy sci-fi romance; collect an undeserved Razzie nomination for starring in her boyfriend’s allegorical arthouse horror; and now play a Russian assassin-in-the-making in a darkly sexual espionage thriller. One can certainly question the quality of her post-Hunger Games projects, but it’s hard to fault the ambition behind Jennifer Lawrence’s decision-making process.

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Based on a bestselling novel by former CIA operative Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow sees Lawrence star as Dominika, a ballerina dancing at the Bolshoi using her position to take care of her ailing mother. But when an accident leaves her seriously injured, she finds her world in disarray, unable to dance and unable to provide financial support. Her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) has a solution: if she helps him out with a small job, then he can help her back. Yet things don’t go quite as she imagined and she becomes witness to a brutal murder. Rather than have her killed, Vanya sends her to a school for sparrows, young usually ex-military trainees who are taught to use their skills of seduction to get what they want from the enemy (classes include lock-picking and watching S&M pornography). After she shows an unusual defiance, she’s extracted and sent out on her first mission: to seduce and gather information from an American agent (Joel Edgerton). But can she be trusted?

While Passengers was a weird, unsalvageable mess and Mother! an intriguing failure, Red Sparrow is not exactly the home run Lawrence could do with right now. But it’s far from a disaster. There’s a curious perversity that rears its head early in the film during a startlingly grisly shower scene and throughout, there’s a shocking willingness to go to the very edge of what’s acceptable in a contemporary studio movie. There’s full-frontal nudity, violent rape, implied incest, graphic torture and a darkly sexual atmosphere that leads to a number of head-spinningly nasty moments.

But for as many times as director Francis Lawrence (who led Lawrence through three of the four Hunger Games chapters) appears willing to push the boundaries, he’s also equally at home holding back. While some sexual content is portrayed with stunning frankness, other scenes are neutered. There’s an uncomfortable dissonance running throughout that results in a shifting, unsure tone and one wonders what film could have resulted from a steadier, yet wilder, hand (Brian De Palma would have had endless fun with it). The direction feels flat and passionless at times and while there are some impressive panoramic vistas, other stuffier scenes are so overly, clumsily lit that they’re clearly taking place on a set.

It’s commercially understandable why Jennifer Lawrence would be cast in the lead role, and despite a struggle with her accent, she perfects a compellingly self-possessed stare that makes her endlessly fascinating to watch. But the decision to cast so many British and Irish actors in small roles (Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Joely Richardson, Ciaran Hinds, Douglas Hodge, etc) that could have been played with more conviction by Russians is one that remains distracting until the end. It requires a hefty suspension of disbelief that would have been easier to employ had the film been directed with more self-aware silliness (there’s also a horribly misjudged comic turn from Mary-Louise Parker that feels grafted on from an entirely different film). The drabness conflicts with the lurid, campier elements (“You sent me to whore school!”) and again, one wonders how much more fun the film could have been with someone else at the helm.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton in Red Sparrow. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The twists aren’t quite as daring as the film-makers seem to believe (pre-screening, all critics received a note from the director imploring us not to reveal the final left turn) and, instead, the knottiness gets to an exhaustingly convoluted point. It remains largely impossible to emotionally invest in Lawrence’s character (the remoteness, while effective, prevents us from feeling like she’s a real person) and though Edgerton is solid as always, their relationship is even harder to care about. There’s a frustrating lack of chemistry between them that makes the much-anticipated seduction scenes feel largely sexless, and any suggestion of deeper feelings fails to convince. But despite the many flaws, an unwavering narrative propulsion drives the film and sustains interest for the 139-minute running time. Lawrence’s movie-star magnetism keeps us onside, curious to know what her morally conflicted character will do next, and the acclaimed source material provides a page-turning blueprint that, bar some clunky exposition, translates adequately (it might have worked better as a mini-series, though).

What will audiences make of Red Sparrow? It’s a tough sell: a bleak two-hour-plus Russian thriller with graphic rape and torture. It’s also surprisingly low on action, choosing talkiness over more audience-pleasing mayhem. It doesn’t entirely work, but there’s something about its full-throttle nastiness that lingers, and it’s refreshing to see something that exists in the studio system that possesses so many queasily perverse elements. It’s just not quite as seductive as it thinks it is.