Adapted from the novel Coup de Grâce by the French author Marguerite Yourcenar, the war film explores passion amid underlying political tones.

In the meantime, Sophie and her aunt try to keep up appearances, holding dinners and providing entertainment for the officers as best as they can, with their supplies of food and drink dwindling.

Erich, like others under his command, has joined the Freikorps due to lacking any other prospects or purpose in life following Germany's defeat in World War I.

Sophie's own apparent free spirit is belied when the medic tells Erich how she had been raped some time previously by a drunken Lithuanian soldier.

After being informed that no reinforcements are coming and all German troops are expected to withdraw by the New Year, Erich leads an offensive that results in the loss of the only medic.

Erich shoots her in the head with his pistol, poses with his men for a group photo, and boards the waiting troop train, all in summary fashion.

The events of the novel, Marguerite Yourcenar's Coup de Grâce (1939), are narrated from the first-person point of view of the soldier Erich von Lhomond.

Earlier in that scene, we share Sophie's physical point of view as she looks across the battlefield through Erich's rangefinder and is startled to realize that Grigori is a member of the opposing force as they retreat with a wounded comrade.

When Erich is told that Sophie herself had been raped by a sergeant before his group's arrival, his typically dispassionate response highlights the gap between the stated event and his military mindset.

Hans-Bernard Moeller and George Lellis remark that "One can argue that Schlöndorff assembles an array of alienating strategies that operate subtly and scrape against the grain of a superficially realist narrative.

This movie's narrative contains many gaps and ellipses, as well as many places where, with characterizations developed only through externalized behavior, motivation is implicit or ambiguous; all of these require an alert viewer to fill in what is missing.

"[4] Similarly, Vincent Canby, in his New York Times review, calls Coup de Grâce "an extremely studied, sorrowful movie, photographed in a fine, chilly black and white that has the important effect of removing the story even further away from our emotions.