Female Agents captures the blood and guts of the women at the heart of the Special Operations Executive, a band of assassins, saboteurs and fighters that offered equality to both sexes.

There is a tendency to over romanticise the work these women did – though McKenna's film shows just how grim the end result could be. Similarly Jean-Paul Salomé's Female Agents (aka Les Femmes de l'ombre) pulls no punches.

Salomé piles straight into the story – a rescue mission to occupied France to snatch a man who knows the secrets of D-Day. Simultaneously a Nazi officer on the verge of uncovering those secrets must be killed.

The SOE recruits two professionals – a sister and brother played by Sophie Marceau and Julien Boiselier – along with a handful of amateurs to carry out the job. Parachuted into France, they succeed in grabbing their man but fail to make their escape. From there the situation rapidly deteriorates. One by one the girls are compromised until, at the hands of the Gestapo, they can expect only slow torture and lingering death.

This is real cloak-and-dagger stuff, a Second World War espionage film of the old school that resembles The Dirty Dozen in nylons with a touch of Where Eagles Dare. Both gripping and exhilarating, it is bold enough to present sequences of women being beaten and confident enough to know that such scenes are an authentic representation of what occurred.

The action sequences are heart-stoppingly delivered. An ambush in a train station sets the scene for the rest of the film. This is a richly textured, retro stylised war film that benefits enormously from the bravura acting of its principals. Never overblown or clichéd, it instead relies on a touchable, tangible wartime flavour that never once falters.


On general release from June 27