‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Beautiful but Staggeringly Bleak Vision of Female Depression in 18th Century Austria
20.02.2024 - 20:57
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang Although it comes from the filmmaking duo behind “Goodnight Mommy” and “The Lodge,” Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala‘s “The Devil’s Bath” is not a horror movie. Its sinister, woodsy atmospherics, where wet leaves mingle with mud and fishscales and menstrual blood, may suggest witchcraft or devil worship.
But it is actually something far more frightening — an exploration, based on real records, of a chapter of Austrian history so dark it could be a black hole, which might account for its invisibility to posterity. But if the story is so pitilessly bleak you may want to look away, the filmmaking craft is so compelling that you can’t.
The world of “The Devil’s Bath” is one that cannot be easily escaped, however much one might want, in the words of one of the women it emblematizes, “to be gone from it.” With only a couple of feature acting credits to her name, Anja Plaschg (who as Soap&Skin also provides the soulful scraping strings and broken, breathy folk hymns on the soundtrack) is astonishingly convincing as Agnes, the young woman first seen happily weaving berries and twigs into her bridal headdress. It is 1750 in the Styria region of Upper Austria and Agnes is to marry Wolf (David Scheid) and move to his lakeside fishing community some way away from her native village.
The wedding is a joyful occasion, even if Agnes is nonplussed by the hillside house Wolf has borrowed money to buy for them. When her brother gives her the dismembered finger of a woman recently executed for infanticide (an act we witness in the film’s somber prologue) to use as a fertility token, she happily accepts, and places it under her and Wolf’s shared mattress.
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