1750, Austria: any film based on ‘historical records’ which starts as devastatingly as The Devil’s Bath does, at least, place its cards on the table. This richly beautiful, if always stark film examines the lives of women, and as much as it focuses on one woman, it allows us to pause long enough to extrapolate, thinking about the generations of women who must have felt the same miseries, only never entering the record. Hundreds, thousands probably, for every one whose sad fate was ever written down. It’s a devastating watch, and it keeps this up throughout its runtime.
We start in a sparse, rural location with a woman carrying a crying baby into the nearby forest, putting her own rosary around its neck before matter-of-factly hurling the child off a waterfall. This being done, she calmly walks to a nearby town and confesses her crime. But the film doesn’t then backfill her story, instead picking up with another local woman: Agnes (Anja Plashg) is about to marry, but she’s still young enough and naïve enough to measure and mark her height against a barn beam at the family farm before she gets ready – a final childish indulgence, perhaps, before she heads for the more laborious strictures of adult life. Certainly, despite the celebrations, this marriage feels transactional, as much about heaving the marriage goods to church, then swapping a floral crown for a cap and pinafore, as about anything to do with ‘love’ per se.
Agnes has been raised properly, and desires to be a ‘good wife’ to her husband Wolf (David Scheid), a man who remains ambiguous, by the by, rather than overtly cruel or dismissive. The film would be the poorer for it, were he written as a villain, and the film looks more at the whole societal structure of Agnes’s life than at individuals. Likewise, Agnes’s new mother-in-law (Maria Hofstätter) is more aggressively disappointed in her new daughter than aggressive per se, as much as her gruff instructions on how to run the household are hard to bear. It’s soon clear that Agnes’s life will not turn out as she imagined. Her marriage is colourless, perfunctory – and unconsummated, putting paid to her simple dream of having children of her own. The environment is harsh, the work (as a fishwife) is exhausting, and her new community is tough through circumstance, with little time to accommodate a newcomer, especially one with a tendency to stubbornly hang on to youthful affectations. Agnes is alternately chivvied and overlooked; the days begin to roll sadly forward.
Women for whom the daily grind proved untenable had few options open to them. Hey, in many places in the world, that’s still the case, which is always at the back of your mind as you watch this story unfold. Agnes becomes ill; we’d call it depression, but in her century it was called melancholia, or more colloquially ‘the devil’s bath’, a tendency to self-flagellate or even attempt suicide due to one’s state of mind. By this point in time, melancholia was deemed to be treatable – albeit in a horrendous blend of folk wisdom, religious penance and bodily harm kind of a way, which we see inflicted upon an already brittle Agnes by her concerned new family. Of course, not only women feel this misery, and Agnes has already witnessed the aftermath of a suicide near her new home, and the disposal of the man’s remains amongst the cattle corpses and unburied bones, given the religious edict ‘gainst self-slaughter. The often-absent priest speaks to the congregation of the dead man’s great sin, recalling that a local woman who recently murdered her child could at least confess before her execution. Agnes has already stumbled on the woman’s remains, preserved nearby as a caution to others – her severed head preserved in a cage for, presumably, longevity (the tableau would lack something if animals carried off the head). Does any of this help Agnes? No, but in her fevered state, it seems to offer some kind of warped solace. She understands something, and begins to act accordingly.
The Devil’s Bath falls midway on a timeline between The Witch (2015) and Lady Macbeth (2016) and whilst it lacks the occult aspects of the one and the more straightforwardly rebellious instincts of the other, it nonetheless retains the same issues of moral rectitude, isolation and the impact upon young women of being bereft the trappings of respectable life: marriage and children, a sense of belonging, a community, or any legitimate support. It resembles The Witch in its use of natural light and candle/firelight too; yes, other films using natural light are available, but it still feels as though The Witch sets the bar for that shooting style in recent years, although The Devil’s Bath blends in more variety, even arguably pathetic fallacy, moving from warm sunlight to gloom, mist and what feels like an abundance of darkness.
Although some of the film’s visual symbols are quite straightforward – not hard codes to crack – they still fit subtly and seamlessly into the drear substance of everyday life. It’s a wonderfully shot film. Group shots are reminiscent of Brueghel, probably because the lives of the European peasant class barely changed in the interim between the painter’s lifespan and that of Agnes Schicken – again, a real person, a person on the record. The film is perfectly cast, with plausible and real seeming people and it’s a small point, but the absence of anachronistic veneers and fillers in this group of actors really helps sustain the illusion. These are hardworking, God-fearing people, even if God only pops up on the periphery; that is, until people decide to take themselves closer to Him. Agnes is sympathetic throughout, finely written and finely acted with no superfluous dialogue. Everything spoken is meaningful, and even at her most desperate, we can understand her terror.
Of course, two hours of a story like this is not going to be for everyone; this is not a horror in a conventional sense either, more a character study and a devastatingly fleshed-out history lesson. For this reviewer however, it is a note perfect, quiet but compelling reckoning with a real-life past tragedy. Is it a folk horror? Sort of; it’s more a horror about folk, and that distinction is important. That all in mind, The Devil’s Bath comes wholeheartedly recommended.
The Devil’s Bath (2024) is available now on Shudder.