‘The Devil’s Bath’ Is Unbearably Despairing—Which Is Why You Should Watch
Movies don’t come much more despairing than The Devil’s Bath. Premiering in theaters before its release June 28 on Shudder, the film is a period piece from Goodnight Mommy writers/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala that offers a harrowing view of the grim realities of women’s life in 18th-century rural Europea. A sorrowful saga about a young wife’s descent into desolation and derangement, this slow-burner of a horror drama offers few respites from its literal and figurative darkness. Nonetheless, it’s a fiery sermon of despondency and damnation, as well as a memorable nightmare of marriage, motherhood, and madness.
In upper Austria in 1750, a woman plucks up her crying baby and walks him to the top of a waterfall. There, with a stern expression and little fanfare, she drops the tyke to its death, after which she crosses herself and visits the nearby prison to announce, “I’ve committed a crime.” For this murder, her toes and fingers are severed and her head is removed from her shoulders and placed in a cage to rest, forever, beside her decapitated body, which sits on a chair in a three-columned woodlands site as a reminder to all about the consequences of sin.
Shortly thereafter, Agnes (Anja Plaschg) packages up her collection of dead bugs and, with her mother and brother’s assistance, drags a cart with a dowry (of a chicken) to her wedding to Wolf (David Scheid). Upon arriving at the festivities, Agnes surfs a crowd of well-wishers as Wolf tries to take her hand, and the strangeness of this custom is offset by the auspicious mood it conjures. That atmosphere is not to last, alas. Though Agnes believed that they’d be staying with Wolf’s mother Gänglin (Maria Hofstätter), he reveals to her that he’s purchased a nearby hillside house for them. Since it boasts space for a shrine and a sizable bedchamber, she gladly acquiesces to these circumstances (not that she has a choice). At a bonfire later that evening, she’s handed a severed finger by her brother as a gift of good luck for having a child—a gesture that’s countered by the sight of Wolf drunkenly coming on to a local man.