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."Moeller, Hans-Bernhard; Lellis, George. "Coup de grâce". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2019-04-22.. 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. We don't respond to it viscerally. We contemplate it with a certain amount of detachment . . .
