Powerful to the point of punishment, The Devil’s Bath (Des Teufels Bad) is Austria’s contender for the Best International Feature Oscar in 2025. It won’t win. It probably won’t even make the shortlist. Too bleak. Too uncompromising.
Seen one way, it’s a group portrait of the extremely grim existence hacked out by peasants in a remote part of 18th-century Austria. Seen another, it’s the progress of one female from fragile, dreamy single girl to married woman in psychological extremis.
Anja Plaschg plays Agnes, a sweet, unworldly creature who in early scenes is married off to Wolf (David Scheid), a bear of a man who seems delighted to be married to her. Or maybe he’s just delighted to be married at all. In this closed and superstitious society, being married is important, and bearing children a close second.
The marriage does not go well, partly because of Wolf’s real feelings for Agnes, partly because Wolf’s mother (Maria Hofstätter), a purse-lipped toughie, is always in her daughter-in-law’s face about everything. The marriage is a mistake, it seems, and from the mother’s point of view it must be Agnes’s fault.
In a prologue in which a distressed woman throws her baby to its death over a waterfall, writer-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have suggested that things are not going to end well.
But before they tuck in properly to Agnes’s decline and fall, they spend time laying the table – how hard the work is (catching carp in the cold river), how inhospitable the dwellings (the dark low house Agnes and Wolf inhabit), the permanent lack of light, the dirty clothes everyone wears. The sun does not shine much, it is often dank and damp.
Franz and Fiala occasionally give us wispy, misty beauty shots, as much to point up the gulf between Disneyfied versions of Grimm’s fairy tales and the hardscrabble reality on which those tales were based. From one angle this place is picture-postcard pretty, but that’s not the way it’s generally presented here.
Plaschg’s rough gash of a face is big-featured and proud-bone and she uses it expressively to depict a woman who probably would have been OK with the right husband but is just not psychologically built for adversity. Hers is a potent portrayal of mounting internal despair, emphasised by a scratchy, droney soundtrack (also by Plaschg) containing hints of Nico’s wheezy, forlorn churchy harmonium.
Eventually, Agnes does something terrible, out of a pressing need to escape her situation. And though we feel extreme sympathy for her – we are never less than on her side throughout – Franz and Fiala make us feel the horrible brutality of her crime.
A post-script clarifies this turn of events, explaining that suicide was not an option for many pious people – it meant eternal damnation of the soul – and so they would commit a capital crime and then take the death sentence that went with it, hoping for absolution from a priest before they departed this world.
It’s what the woman in the opening scenes was doing hoiking her child over the waterfall. It’s what Agnes eventually feels compelled to do to escape her own predicament. The “suicide by proxy” phenomenon was chosen by hundreds of (mostly) women in German-speaking countries at the time.
Sunshine? Relief? Light and shade? Not so much. Hints of The Wicker Man, maybe, if you want to tie The Devil’s Bath to the horror genre, though this is no entertainment. It’s possible also to see hints of Carl Theodor Dreyer as Agnes moves into the endgame – visual canonisation by ecstatic imagery courtesy of cinematographer Martin Gschlacht. Agnes is a monster but also a victim, a Joan of Arc burnt on the pyre pf others’ expectations.
Some people get misty eyed over Europe in ye olden times, but not Franz and Fiala. This is the Europe that people fled to America to escape: brutal, ugly, hard, dismal and poor. Based on this reminder, we’re all lucky to have left it behind.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
