Year: 2024

Runtime: 121 minutes

Written and directed by: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

Starring: Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter

Caution: Below contains discussion of mental health issues such as depression that some may find triggering.

By Sarah Manvel

“The Devil’s Bath” is a profoundly excellent and disturbing movie about depression, despair and the ways in which people coped with those emotions in 18th century Austria. It’s also an incredibly beautiful film, shot with a tremendous eye by Martin Gschlacht for the natural beauty which surrounds the woodland village at the center of the story. But it is also so remorselessly grim that’s it’s very tricky to recommend.

Before the opening credits, a woman kills a baby by throwing it down a waterfall. This is shown in full. The woman then confesses to her crime and is beheaded. Her corpse is left to rot on a chair near the waterfall, with her severed head in a metal cage on a wooden table. Her fingers and toes are taken as souvenirs, and one is given to new bride Agnes (Anja Plaschg) by her brother as a fertility charm on her wedding day. And if you think this quite a start you have no idea.

Agnes’ husband Wolf (David Scheid) is not a bad man but it’s quickly apparent he married her mainly for the dowry that allowed him to buy a house. Wolf’s village is not far from her own but the new one is not welcoming even during her wedding. His mother (Maria Hofstätter) is overbearing and unkind, rearranging Agnes’ kitchen to suit herself and criticizing every single little thing that she does. But Agnes is so looking forward to having a child she kisses that severed finger every night as she hides it under the mattress. Only the single sex act Wolf performs to Agnes (not with) is 1) not the kind that makes a baby 2) so repellent to him that during it he pushes her face away. Agnes is told again and again it is all her fault she is not pleasing Wolf and his mother, and she even overhears them agreeing she’s now their cross to bear.

She goes to the barber, but his solution is to thread a string through the skin at the back of her neck and suggest she play with it enough the wound festers. This will let the melancholy out. A man in the village hangs himself and his body is taken away to rot in a field as his mother screams. The priest sermonises that because he rejected life, the afterlife is also closed to him, so that man’s soul is doomed to wander the earth for eternity, never finding rest. Agnes goes back to her mother, who puts her out, and when Wolf retrieves her he must tie her feet and carry her over his shoulder to force her back to his home. 

And the most horrible part of all this horror is how everyday it is. Villagers work in Wolf’s fishery for a literal piece of daily bread, and when they ask for a second (because they are pregnant, or starving) the mother-in-law sets her mouth until they turn away. Agnes has to do her chores around the house at night with a burning stick clamped between her teeth. The women all have their preferred spots in the river on wash day and refuse to budge for her. The goats get maggots, the flour goes mouldy and how is anyone meant to bear such exhausting hopelessness? Ms Plaschg does extraordinary work in showing Agnes’ deteriorating mental state without ever verging into camp, and making her every thought visible as the movie marches on to its remorseless end. Under the name “Soap&Skin” she also composed the movie’s score.

Writer-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala set the tone at the start with the warning “based on historical records.” But it builds to an utterly revolting finale, all the more so because the final revolting act is done with a manic sense of joy. There’s rarely been a better depiction of how a village, or a society, happily brutalises people to ensure they conform. The title is a metaphor for depression, for the depths which Agnes, through no real fault of her own, finds herself in. And the horror is so ordinary, and so bone-deep that this review is also a warning. “The Devil’s Bath” joins a very rare pantheon of excellent but disturbing movies I hope I never see again. It is by far the most memorable picture from this year’s Berlinale.