Review: A Call to Spy Is Undone by Spy-Thriller Clichés and Historical Liberties

In 1941, Vera Atkins, a Romanian Jewish immigrant in London, joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret British intelligence organization, and quickly became responsible for the recruitment and supervision of dozens of women who would deploy to France as secret agents. In bringing the under-celebrated story of Atkins and a pair of her most intrepid spies to light, director Lydia Dean Pilcher and screenwriter Sarah Megan Thomas certainly make the case that this extraordinary history deserves to be told. But A Call to Spy often exhibits the montage-packed pacing of a trailer, expending more effort in convincing audiences how much this story matters rather than in telling it.

The film’s script compresses the history of the SOE so that two of its most fascinating figures, American agent Virginia Hall (Thomas) and British agent Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), can form a fast friendship, even though their training and service in France didn’t overlap in real life. There’s a fuzziness in this ahistorical acquaintance that exists only for dramatic convenience, but factual accuracy isn’t the main problem here. In the attempt to equitably juggle the two spies in France and Vera (Stana Katic) back home, the film inevitably tilts toward Virginia, who names her wooden leg “Cuthbert,” scrawls letters to F.D.R. demanding that he make her a diplomat, and refuses to use an umbrella under any circumstance.

Since Virginia’s spy activities include blowing up trains and directing covert helicopter landings, Noor, a wireless operator, can’t compete for dramatic space given that she’s mainly sedentary throughout A Call to Spy. And since Thomas plays Virginia with a brusque contemporary edge that feels more out of place than Katic’s canny, guarded Vera or Apte’s sweetly fierce Noor, there’s a tonal imbalance on top of a structural one.

The most interesting questions of service and identity that the film raises—like the dark underbelly of British anti-Semitism that Vera seems to experience—often get passed over in favor of Virginia’s more action-packed trajectory. But precisely because its focus is so split, A Call to Spy lacks the pervasive sense of danger one expects from a spy thriller. The scenes that evince clichés of such films—at a train station, a stranger hands Virginia a note that reads “follow me,” which she promptly eats—don’t register as suspenseful or realistic.

Of course, the threat to resistance fighters, whether overseas agents with aliases or locals protecting their families and communities on the ground, was brutally omnipresent, as the film sometimes evokes. Virginia’s success as a spy springs from her ability to galvanize civilians, entrusting young people with life-threatening tasks she cannot perform herself as she becomes increasingly recognizable to the Germans. Yet A Call to Spy rarely fleshes out her relationships with any of her French recruits, who speak in hushed tones about the mission at hand but rarely about who they are or what they’re fighting for.

There’s an exchange with a French ally that’s perfect as it is though. As Virginia approaches a ticket agent at a railway station, she realizes that he’s recognized her from the wanted poster hanging nearby. There’s a long, tense silence before he slides her a train ticket and speaks: “Bon courage.” Good people, just like good stories, are everywhere, hiding in plain sight.