The story and characters are fictional, however, dreamed up by writer-director Jean-Paul Salome for the purposes of a pacey blockbuster.

Sophie Marceau plays a tough, no-nonsense member of the French Resistance who is recruited into Churchill’s SOE after escaping to London. She assembles a team of three other French female agents to parachute into France and rescue a wounded Brit who knows the secrets of the upcoming Normandy landings.

The mission goes awry and the women find themselves in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a Nazi counter-espionage officer (Moritz Bleibtreu), the former fiancé of one of the women.

It’s a gripping yarn that belts along suspensefully, even if you never really believe that “D-Day depends on them”, as the tag-line goes.

The fast pace, however, comes at the expense of characterisation, with the women only broadly defined and the “female” issues they face (one learns that she is pregnant) dealt with superficially.

(Cert 15, 120 mins)