‘The Devil’s Bath’ Is an Immersive Marvel

In the beginning, the trees stand tall and straight. The trunks are evenly spaced out, insects float lazily between their solid columns, and the greenery rejoices and rewards as the sunlight reaches the ground. But as The Devil’s Bath goes on, a murky, wet fog settles in, and branches reach out from trunks and become tangled, creating a looming and foreboding net in the landscape. The world becomes hungry, sodden, and webbed, a monster’s sticky maw. And as the land becomes inhospitable, so too does protagonist Agnes’s (Anja Plaschg) mind. 

The Devil’s Bath is jaw-dropping, an achievement that manages to depict a glaring and stark historical horror with a sober realism remarkably commingled with poetry, achieved by virtue of its viscerally lyrical empathy and care, making its emotional core all the more trenchant and timeless.

The film, written and directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, the duo behind the harrowing and austere masterpiece Goodnight Mommy, takes place in mid-eighteenth-century Upper Austria and follows a young woman as she embarks on a new life. Agnes, along with everyone around her, is deeply religious. She is deeply enamored of her childhood home and the environment around her: the blooming nature, the hazy insects, the tart berries. She collects the parchment-like bodies of dead moths and dragonflies and spiders that, when they were alive, she played with as pets, gently holding them and letting them lilt across her face. When she leaves her childhood home for the first time, for she is to be married off to Wolf (David Scheid), who lives in a neighboring village, she carries her insects with her, cradled within the shell-like bowl made of a tree’s bark — she turns to them often in her new home. They comfort her like old friends, souvenirs of bygone bliss.

Married life is not at all what Agnes expected. Though the wedding was a cheerful event, everyday life with Wolf and his overbearing mother, Mother Gänglin (Maria Hofstätter), is more than a let-down for Agnes. Agnes’s sole wish and prayer, surely along with many of the women about her, is to be a good wife to her husband, with a good wife being defined as one who bears children first and foremost, cooks food for her husband, and accomplishes the day’s chores with swiftness and efficiency. But her prayer seems to be quickly dashed — on the wedding night, and every night afterwards, Wolf does not have sex with her, and this confounds and breaks Agnes, who weeps as Wolf sleeps. What’s more, Mother Gänglin is extremely harsh on Agnes, wanting her to work and cook for Wolf as she does, which Agnes, the unique and distinct individual she is, can not accomplish. Turn after turn, Agnes’s attempts at goodness fall short of her expectations and of Mother Gänglin’s, and the toll this failure takes of the young woman is far too great for her to bear. 

Plaschg’s Agnes is a poetic and dreamy soul, finding solace and comfort, the divine, in nature. But the nature surrounding her new home is brutal. Wolf’s is a family of fishermen whose hunting grounds are black, muddy ponds writhing with catfish. Mother Gänglin expects Agnes to fish alongside the men, and Agnes finds this work demanding and cruel, even as she works diligently to please her husband and mother-in-law. Heartbroken and straining, the film watches as Agnes crumbles in her attempts to fit in with her new family, ultimately finding that she will not be able to fit in while also maintaining a sense of herself. And so Agnes’ fractures ultimately break.  

There is an immense kindness and love in Agnes that is slowly snuffed by her new life. When Wolf doesn’t have sex with her, she feels as though it’s a failure on her part; it is hinted that Wolf might be gay. When Mother Gänglin arranges Agnes’s home to resemble her own by removing signs of nature and life, Agnes wearily obliges. And when Wolf throws the husks of Agnes’s precious insects into their home’s hearth, believing them to be trash, Agnes spends the night weeping, and moves her things — her cross, flowers, the remaining papery bodies of moths — to a room in the cellar, building a shrine she prays at in solitude, desperately hoping for goodness that doesn’t seem to want to come. 

The Devil’s Bath is as much a sweeping historical period film as it is an empathetic portrait of a woman fraying under the demands of her world. Through Agnes, Fiala and Franz offer us a tender and agonizing look into the past that reflects our kinship with those who came before us with unsettling clarity. The duo’s lens is endlessly sensitive even as it is historically precise as it dives into Agnes, showing with throbbing meticulousness through this sweet young woman how and that unique psyches have varying responses to the same events. 

The film, in other words, is about a mind getting lost in the tar pit of depression. Fiala and Franz work off the research of historian Kathy Stuart, who writes about a phenomenon of “suicide by proxy” in early modern Germany. People would, as they do today, become depressed and deeply suicidal, but because of strict religious beliefs dictating that the act of suicide accrues eternal damnation in the afterlife — because one isn’t able to undergo confession (repent and receive the eucharist) and receive absolution before death — the suicidal person would turn to murder, punishable by death. The person would commit the crime and quickly turn themselves into authorities, who, before executing them, would allow them confession and their soul the possibility of salvation. The suicidal person would then hopefully die. Most often, those who partook of suicide by proxy were women, and their victims were children. 

The Devil’s Bath explores the phenomena of suicide by proxy through a gimlet-eyed portrait of Agnes, a woman who slowly, at first and then all at once, becomes profoundly mentally ill. The film’s genius is its own, as is Plaschg’s understanding of Agnes. What Agnes goes through in her new life isn’t particularly cruel or atypical; it’s new to her. Her mother-in-law is overbearing and coddles Wolf and her surroundings are certainly different from her childhood village. Agnes is embarking on life without the comforts of home and family for the first time, and discomfort, confusion, and frustration are all expected as challenges and changes present themselves. Agnes, though, is uniquely sensitive, and the challenges she faces more than hurt her; they sear and lacerate, and each perceived failure on her part strikes her with the weight of apocalypse. Her unique psyche responds uniquely to a situation that might have been fairly common for a young woman of her time. 

The film’s understanding of Agnes’s psyche and exploration of the slinking step of depression is masterful. As Agnes becomes sad, disheartened and disenchanted, and hopeless; the world around her becomes suffocating. Her beloved nature becomes antagonistic — her new village is often overcast, and branches, bushes, and shrubbery close in on her and attack her, making it tough for her to move through the land. The sticky ponds suck her steps in, threaten to swallow her at a direct and balletic pace with the work of her mind, whose thoughts grow and tower, blocking out the light of reason. Reflected in her environment is the movement of depression within Agnes — the fog becomes heavy and damp and perennial as Agnes’s thoughts of failure settle stolidly in; she continuously gets lost in the forest, sometimes thrice in one day, running in circles in the way her mind circles and then mires her wholly in the singular belief of her failure.

Fiala and Franz’s work here is deft, slight, realistic, and beautifully poetic in one breath. Never lapsing into an overwrought vignette of mental illness, The Devil’s Bath is measured as it reveals not only the horror the mind turns the world and itself into but also allows the brutalism and lack of understanding society extends toward those suffering from mental illness to materialize with a sober inevitably. Its historically accurate depiction of societal beliefs and lay practices aimed at “curing” a person of depression doesn’t pass judgment so much as it quietly bears witness to our pasts, strange but still ours. Because it carefully allows for the horror endemic to the phenomenon of suicide by proxy to unveil itself without ever veering into feverish melodrama or a kind of retroactive romanticism (a kind of treatment that might have exploited Agnes’s story), the film, paradoxically, becomes all the more sensitive and kind. The film understands just as Agnes’s thoughts take on compelling reality, so too are her society’s beliefs respected for their perceived validity.

Plaschg plays Agnes with immense care and love, showing with the increasingly tight knit of her brows and widening eyes Agnes’s inner turmoil. And as the illness within her mind darkens and becomes more and more messy and knotted and oily, Plaschg’s Agnes’s head becomes visibly heavier, bucking under the weight of her sadness, and she becomes more violent with herself as self-hate settles in. When she is made to refuse a second loaf of bread to one of the day-laborers who works for her mother-in-law, because rules insist that a person ought to get only one loaf, Agnes tumbles into the forest and scrapes her tongue with a branch until it bleeds, for uttering the refusal so against her soul’s kindness. Plaschg shows us, with nary a word and with shrewd physical grace and sympathy, how her mind is destroying Agnes, is losing herself in her body, vacating as the murk and mess take it over.  

Plaschg and this film are a marvel for how they reveal the creeping cadence of depression and suicidal ideation, illustrate what depression looks like on and in a body — they understand how heavy sadness, one prompted by circumstances that to an outsider might seem inconsequential or rote, feels. And this felt weight of sadness, which leads in a tragically inevitable roll toward suicidal ideation, is The Devil’s Bath gift. The weight of something so singular and personal as feeling, even as it is contextualized within history and a time far away and gone, is made urgent and resonant, veritably alive, through Plaschg’s sympathetic portrayal and the filmmakers’ understanding of how to tell a story compellingly. 
The film balances aching tenderness and understanding for Agnes, presenting her story with metrical respect for her mind and its perceptions and feelings, depicting her soul’s subtle poetry with a like poeticism, and thereby captures her with simultaneous accuracy and humanistic care, and thereby does a justice to all the women and children it is dedicated to. The Devil’s Bath serves as example par excellence of how historical stories can be justifiably and effectively told with care and respect and understanding for the mentalities and subjectivities of the people at their core. This film is a masterpiece.