This movie is based on the war experiences of 3 actual women and is a heroic story. Unfortunately, the way it is told didn't impress me. Perhaps that is because I already knew Virginia Hall's story in some detail thanks to a book "A Woman of No Importance". According to that book, Hall was an agent of great importance with many significant contributions to the war effort. In fact, reading that book, one might think that Hall was more important than anyone other than Eisenhower. Despite what must be some bias on the part of the author, I still believe that book to be mostly accurate.

The circumstances behind the entire story are complex. The movie had to choose how much of that to tell and left out a lot of nuance. It touched on many aspects but didn't dwell on them. Some of these are: 1) For the Allies, women as spies in the field was unheard of. It was considered unsporting, ungentlemanly and too dangerous.

2) Women were generally not respected for any abilities beyond secretarial. This prejudice is almost impossible for the 21st century viewer to completely comprehend. Vera Atkins was almost an exception to this. She was respected by her boss, but many of her accomplishments were only possible as his representative. Hall suffered for this even more so in France. She was often overruled in the field by less senior male agents despite being right most of the time. Yet she still accomplished a great deal.

3) Many of the details of events are not known with certainty. Atkins was suspected by some of being incompetent (see #4) or even a double agent. Even history has not resolved this with certainty. Also historical records don't always show with certainty exactly who betrayed whom. At least one other fictional work proposes that the British deliberately allowed some of their agents to be killed so as to protect the secret of just how effective the network was. (This same thinking was actually used regarding the German's Enigma code where some information gathered was not used lest it give away that the Allies had broken that code.)

4) About a third of F section's agents were captured and/or killed. The SOE made a huge mistake in not taking seriously signs that some of their agents had been captured, especially Noor. There were protocols for this which were ignored because of uncertainties resulting from the "fog of war".

5) Because this kind of spy craft was new, at least for the SOE, agents were not completely trained and sometimes their training was cut short by need.

This movie is well worth watching to remind oneself of the bravery and sacrifice of so many during WW2. One can't help but think of the adage that War is Hell.

This succeeds in highlighting the important (and often under-looked) true story of female spies in WWII. I was already familiar with Vera Atkins and Virginia Hall and it was nice to see their stories put to film. It was great learning the heroic story of Noor Inayat Khan too. "A Call To Spy" is the kind of film that gets you researching the true events after. More people should know about these women.

As a film itself, it definitely had a TV-movie vibe. The script was rather woeful at times and occasionally the acting came across quite wooden. It still did enough to tell the stories though, while keeping my interest. I would have thought a film depicting the heroic actions of spies in WWII would have more tension and better pacing though.

It felt a bit too long at times, and during the first 20 minutes, I wrestled whether to abandon it entirely. I felt the story of these women deserved my time though, so I persisted and I'm mostly glad I did.

Sarah Megan Thomas delivered a particularly good performance as Virginia Hall. You could easily tell she was passionate about this film and the story of these women. Stana Katic had great chemistry with her too.

A few months ago I watched the reality docuseries "Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits", which depicted the SOE in WWII. I highly recommend watching that series before watching this, as it gave a fantastic education and background to the roles of these brave men and women. As a movie? "A Call To Spy" is rather lacklustre and has its share of shortcomings. As a story? Everyone should know about it.

I was looking forward to watch this movie. The story based on true events looked like something really interesting and informative, clearly a story with the potential to make a good movie. But the truth is that they failed to do that, the result is just a slow repetitive story, without any suspense, certainly not with the material they had for this story. The acting wasn't bad but the the plot was. To me it's a missed opportunity to make a good movie about a story that was worth to be told.