Gruesome and viscerally upsetting, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath takes an unsparing, pointedly grim look at the wages of being a peasant woman in early-18th-century Austria. Set on the cusp of the Enlightenment, the writer-directors’ chilling new film serves to remind us of just how uneven the historical arc toward progress has been.
Inspired by the real phenomenon of 17th- and 18th-century European women committing suicide by state proxy—murdering people, usually children, in order to be executed by the state—The Devil’s Bath details a social configuration at once familiar and alienating. It immerses the viewer back to the era’s uncanny, religion-infused perception of the world in a manner comparable to Robert Eggert’s 2015 breakthrough The Witch but with a brutal matter of factness that resists succumbing to the horror genre’s fetish for all things arcane.
Franz and Fiala thrust us into local life in the Austrian forest with an icy-cold prologue depicting an unnamed woman (Natalija Baranova) committing an unspeakable crime amid vast forests. She passively turns herself into the local authorities with the simple phrase, “I have something to confess.” Left to rot after her execution for infanticide, the woman’s headless corpse becomes part of the scenery in the area. We then meet the main character, Agnes (Anja Plashg), when she’s given one of the women’s fingers as a good luck charm on the occasion of her wedding.
Agnes’s betrothed is the mild-mannered, hirsute Wolf (David Scheid), youngest son of the local fish-mongering family. Their wedding already foretells trouble, both in the implication that Wolf is gay, and the way the joviality of the event is juxtaposed with bridal traditions that are redolent of folk horror. Witness the 18th-century version of pin the tail on the donkey, in which a blindfolded man attempts to whack to death a rooster that’s been pinned to the ground.
From the gift of the infanticide’s finger to the rooster torture, the village’s practices are utterly untouched by humanist secularism, but they’re also hardly thoroughly Christianized in the ideal sense of the concept. Dismembered body parts are venerated as magical charms, augurs are read from animal skulls, melancholy is treated with leeches and by intentionally letting a wound fester, and nature itself can seem to possess malevolent agency.
Married life with an emotionally distant man who takes his customs—and the word of his severe and very particular mother (Maria Hofstatter)—as law reveals itself as an inescapable bind, and Agnes starts to lose her grip. At times it even seems as if the world itself has it out for her, as when she gets stuck in the mud flats around the river where the villagers fish, or when the bushes and brambles catch on her long skirts, keeping her stuck in place.
Franz and Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom. Not much that’s particularly gnarly happens before the film’s inevitable finale, but the filmmakers are thankfully stingy with jump scares, saving the few they use for moments that contribute to the growing atmospheric tension—often figured in the rather literal form of the morning mists of Agnes and Wolf’s riverside town.
Agnes’s decline into severe mental illness within a society that has no answers for such maladies—particularly when experienced by women—outside of panicked pronouncements about Satan is, to the filmmakers’ credit, utterly tortuous to watch. With the most basic pop-psychology understanding, it’s easy enough to imagine the institutional and mental resources that would be available to a European woman going through this today. At the same time that we empathize with Agnes (and, eventually, her victim), her inability to understand her struggle outside of the precepts of her quasi-pagan folk Catholicism also creates a degree of distance.
Franz and Fiala, though, use this distance to ask us to reflect on the way that the structure of our own lives conditions our reactions to women’s strife. In The Devil’s Bath, the horrors lurking in the European woods turn out to be man-made, and like those contained within the fairy tales of centuries past, the film makes you recognize that they’re still with us in some form today.
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