“The Devil’s Bath” looks and sounds like your average horror movie — there are perturbing scenes of bodily mutilation, menacingly quiet long shots of stark Austrian woodlands and a young woman, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), who spirals into madness.
Yet the cleverness of this psychodrama, by the Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (“The Lodge”), is that it employs the tropes and tools of folk horror without any of that genre’s supernatural flourishes. The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.
The prologue sets the tone. “As my troubles left me weary of this life, it came to me to commit a murder,” reads the opening title card. We see a nameless woman toss a baby off a waterfall and then turn herself into the authorities, going through these motions with a deadeye roboticism. We’re in the boonies of 18th-century Austria, a land of tall, lonely forests and craggy hillsides. Families live in stone cottages and customs are dictated by severe Roman Catholic doctrines inflected by pagan superstitiousness. In this eerie, rather primitive context, its easy to surmise that the murderess is a witch.
When we finally meet Agnes, a devout Catholic, she is initially excited about her marriage to Wolf (David Scheid), a stout, jovial young man who moves his new family into a remote cottage. Things sour quickly: Wolf proves uninterested in physical intimacy with his eager wife (and probably any woman), and Wolf’s cruel, domineering mother (Maria Hofstätter) blames Agnes for their lack of children.
Shifting between naturalistic camerawork and static shots of uncanny landscapes and sunless skies, the film zooms in on Agnes’s deteriorating psychological state with minimal dialogue. A mood of desperation sinks in as the film showcases the punishing routines of rural peasant life, best exemplified by fishing scenes in which the slender Agnes struggles to keep up with the other workers. At one point, she’s stuck in a stretch of viscous black muck at the edge of the lake, a palpably distressing image that draws mockery from her mother-in-law, the fishing crew’s organizer.
Slowly, the film shows its cards. Agnes becomes bedridden, deranged, relying on crude medical practices to cleanse herself to no avail. (Plascg, who also wrote the score, is a musician known as Soap & Skin, and her work is distinguished by a gothy, depressive vibe). There is no demonic turn; no acts of senseless violence — the blood that’s eventually spilled follows a fraught yet clear logic.
Religious women like Agnes took the threat of eternal damnation seriously. Killing yourself was unforgivable, but killing someone else could be absolved. Because of the film’s treacherous atmosphere, I expected some magical intrusion to make sense of all the despair. Instead, we’re left with a chilling matter-of-factness as blunt as a severed head.
The Devil’s Bath
Not rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.
