Dominika dryly asks, “What reward will they give you? A promotion?” Like the scene where he first came to her after her injury, this exchange where she now comes to him is the moment the story shifts: Dominika is going to pay him back for sending her to Sparrow School by turning this hunt on its head. One wonders if her father noticed his attentions back then? In the sequence, he commands his niece to track down Nash and “sacrifice whatever needs to be sacrificed” in order to find the name of Nash’s informant inside the SVR. In that scene, her uncle takes her to a restaurant he at least assumed she loved as a girl. This is not about patriotism, politics, or love for Dominika, it is a longer game of revenge that starts the moment she “graduates.” It is all played close to the chest until, in retrospect, it becomes clear it was about making her own fate and luck-and getting vengeance on her father’s brother who would send her to an institution that uses coercion and threats of state sanctioned murder to facilitate “sex,” both supposedly consensual and that which is clearly not. Is she loyal to her nation or does she really want to defect to the United States as Nash urges? Does she love him or is he a tool to get out of Russia… or even a tool to find the mole her uncle and country is hunting, and who can then be disposed of at the edge of a skinner’s scraping blade? Much of Red Sparrow operates as a cat and mouse thriller in which audiences are forced to repeatedly second guess Dominika’s motivations. There are no accidents, he will make Dominika his, and when one understands this, the cloak-and-dagger affair between Lawrence’s aloof heroine and Joel Edgerton’s surprisingly easy CIA target makes so much more sense in the third act. His school his world his clutches and his influence. ![]() One act of justifiable rage and violence will lead her to come to him for help, which in turn leads to another “misfortune” in which her role as a seducer of a Russian oligarch will become an ultimatum: death or Sparrow School. If one wants to be charitable, Vanya would seem to be putting his brother’s daughter on the road to vengeance, but from that moment he already has designs on her for Sparrow School. If she wants cosmic justice, she will have to take it herself, especially when he reveals evidence he’s acquired proving that Dominika’s injuries were the result of her ballerino co-star, a man who caused her accident so that his lover could assume the prima position. Not in his line of work, and not in Dominika’s life. He laments her tragic fate after an accident on the stage… before stating there are no accidents and there is no fate. And when he comes bearing supposedly happy tidings, he is in essence making his first overture of “courtship” to Dominika in the most repulsive of ways. Vanya, as per Dominika’s mother (Joely Richardson), has always leered at his niece, even when she was but a girl.
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