As Vera Brittain, Alicia Vikander has beauty and presence: her Vera is a brilliant young woman who, in 1914, is just going up to read English at Somerville College, Oxford, although women were still not permitted to take a university degree. Vera’s story is governed by the unbearable paradox of sacrifice.

For too long, women had been expected to sacrifice their lives and identities to men. But with the outbreak of war, men were rushing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of combat, and proto-feminist Vera has the uncomfortable feeling that to compete with men in terms of social usefulness at this key moment, she too must sacrifice herself: abandon her hard-won Oxford place and take up a nursing post either in England or France. And so the agony of political identity goes on.

Her parents, played by Emily Watson and Dominic West, are affectionate, but stuffy and uncomprehending and have no real conception of what is driving their daughter, Vera – or even much of what goes on in the head of Vera’s likable, good-natured brother Edward (Taron Egerton). As for Vera herself, she finds herself nursing a tendresse for one of her brother’s friends: Roland Leighton, played by Kit Harington, while another friend, Victor, played by Colin Morgan (BBC TV’s Merlin) is shyly sweet on her, but is all too obviously unable to confess his feelings. They have another modest friend Geoffrey (Jonathan Bailey), with pacifist leanings: all four men are heading for the front. Their emotional intensities have an Arcadian innocence in peacetime, but all the vows and railway-station farewells lose their meaning once the men have experienced the horror of the trenches.

Vera is to find them absent and embittered when they are home on leave, and it is part of why she too wants to sign up as a nurse and cauterise her own romantic agony in the flame of war. And she can’t forget the tragic irony: she had persuaded her father to let Edward join up – to thank Edward for persuading him to let her go to Oxford. This torment is something history has forced on them, but which they have somehow welcomed, too.

All these ideas are clearly enough expressed in the film, and there is a shrewd moment when, near the battlefields of France, Vera sees a huge number of stretchers bearing the dead and wounded – the scene is influenced, perhaps, by the hillside of white crosses at the end of Attenborough’s Oh! What A Lovely War. But after the heavy weather of sadness, there seems to be no real thunderstorm of anger at the futility and the waste. Vera is permitted one scene in which she speaks out against punitive reparations being imposed on German soldiers. But this is characterised largely by its restraint. Vikander herself carries off the role with delicacy and poise, but the film does not really allow her to explode with emotion and show the grief that has been boiling inside her. There are intelligent performances here, but the movie is veiled with good taste.