‘Devil’ in the Details
Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz .
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Austrian co-directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Devil’s Bath begins with a superbly understated opening salvo. A woman tosses her toddler off a waterfall, then marches through the woods, clearly on another mission. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht’s (Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe) deliberate, smooth grey images are entirely dispassionate and largely silent, except for the crunch of leaves under the woman’s feet. Eventually we see her confess the murder to a priest. As was her intention, she’s executed by beheading. The sequence is a demonstration of the 17th and 18th century suicide by proxy epidemic, a legal loophole common in German-speaking Europe at the time that facilitated Church-sanctioned suicide and which Fiala and Franz discovered and drew inspiration for from American historian Kathy Stuart’s book Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation. Because heaven forbid any of us piss off the Church.
“Suicide bombers often suffer from depression, and so they’re prime [candidates] for suicide attacks,” begins Franz via Zoom from Bucheon, where The Devil’s Bath is making its Asian debut.”They can die with the blessing of God. So this kind of phenomenon is still going on in our times. It’s like suicide by cop, a very American phenomenon. People still want to die and are still sometimes unable or not allowed to do it themselves.”
“We thought that would make a great film. Veronica and my films necessarily should provide me time but we like to be a bit disturbed and we like to be vulnerable,” says Fiala of he and Franz’s personal tastes when it comes to the material they spin into a night at the movies. “I think we enjoy hard watches. We like films that shock us, or disturb us, or terrify us, and also make us uncomfortable,” Franz adds, citing the 80 pages of Stuart’s research documenting the interrogation of a woman called Eva that served as the genesis for the film. “That really spoke to us on the emotional level because from that time, we really don’t have a lot of sources about ordinary people, poor people, because nobody was interested in them,” Fiala chimes in. “And then here’s this very, very detailed source that showed this woman, who seemed to have been a perfectionist who always thought she was to blame and she could never be good enough. It felt unexpectedly modern. I think this was the real starting point for the project because we wouldn’t have been interested in making a film just about the past. We need to have a connection to the present.”
Indeed The Devil’s Bath is bizarrely modern in its themes. As Fiala stated, if a period piece doesn’t speak to the now, it’s irrelevant, and Bath most definitely does. On the surface it’s a story about a young woman, Agnes (Soap&Skin musician Anja Plaschg – who scored the film but lobbied to star after reading the script), who moves away from home to a small village after she marries Wolf (David Scheid). She’s an outsider in the community, Wolf is emotionally absent, and Agnes doesn’t get along with the only other person she sees regularly: Wolf’s mother Gänglin (Maria Hofstätter). Under any other circumstances this would fodder for a wacky in-law comedy, but Fiala and Franz use it as a the basis to explore depression and mental illness, repressed sexuality and the power of organised religion. Depression remains something of a taboo subject even in 2024, and we’ve all heard about unfocused societal pressures – at work, home, in the body – that are overwhelming many of us. In the 18th century the primary source was the Church. Now it’s Instagram, but “I think all of us are experiencing immense pressure to function every day, and if you don’t function then I think society still doesn’t have a good answer as to what to do with you,” argues Fiala.
As part of the line-up at Bucheon Fantastic this year, it’s easy to slot The Devil’s Bath into the horror genre, similar to the duo’s The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy. “We wouldn’t call it a horror film, but we’re also not that interested in labels. That’s something that’s put on a film to be [sold] and marketed,” he says. “To do this woman’s life story justice I think it would have felt wrong to be more of a horror film – with the jumpscares and stuff like that. I hope we turned it into film where an audience can understand the horrors this woman is living through.” At various times, The Devil’s Bath recalls Robert Eggers’s The Witch, but also of Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale and Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross, sharing oppressive tones and historic settings that mirror contemporary struggles and also enlighten. Still, since the film premiered at Berlin in February, it’s landed at Neuchâtel and BIFAN, and a major distributor is Shudder. The Lodge flirted with conventional psychological horror in its exploration of trauma and pscyhes, as did Goodnight Mommy with its dive into identity and parental relationships. “We’ve encountered many horror audiences, and I’ve learnt they’re very open minded and very generous. So even if it’s not really a ‘horror’ film they’ll still appreciate it for its dark subject matter.”
None of which works without Plaschg, who turns in a fearless and heartbreaking performance as the unhappy Agnes – and brings the material right into 2024. Instead of wallowing in miserablism, Plaschg makes Agnes’s distress vivid; her inability to get pregnant – which has nothing to do with her – and the invisible hand of the Church pressing down on her make her slide into suicidal depression totally believable. To the film’s credit, there is simultaneously no villain and villains at every turn. Wolf isn’t a bad husband; he’s just gay. “It’s a much weaker film if there’s just one clear reason for Agnes to be depressed. If you can point a finger and say this is the reason and that’s why everything is wrong it’s just too easy an explanation for a very difficult and complex situation,” says Fiala. “It’s Church, it’s society, it’s the fault of everyone that these people didn’t felt free to be the person they wanted to be.”
The Devil’s Bath was a decade in the making, but Fiala and Franz should have their next film out faster than that – and it could be a more traditional horror film. Or at least as traditional as the duo can be. The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy both stylishly played with genre convention and leaned heavily into atmosphere instead. They’re working on an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s 2014 novel A Head Full of Ghosts, which Fiala describes as, “Starting like a classical exorcism story, but then it goes in a totally different direction. I think it’s about different perceptions of reality, of how we remember the past and how we reconstruct it.” Chances are roughly 100% it will say something about 2024 too.