Des Teufels Bad
****/****
starring Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter
written and directed by Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
by Walter Chaw Did it start with Robert Eggers’s The Witch, or was it earlier? I’m not speaking of origins–indeed, the origins of folk horror are as old and as long as the origins of Man. No, I’m wondering about when it became an annual thing to release these little folk-horror movie masterpieces. Films that, for the most part, are relegated to a few niche festivals and then banished to the Neverwhere of streaming, entombed for eventual discovery by a devoted audience that will pass them around like secrets scrawled on a parchment browned and creased from the handling. I’m talking about movies like 2017’s A Dark Song and Hagazussa, 2018’s The Wind, and 2019’s Saint Maud (although most would pick Midsommar for that year’s folk-horror contribution). In 2020, we had the brutal The Dark and the Wicked, but there was also Oz Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel and David Prior’s cult-ready The Empty Man. 2021 gave us Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and the Adams Family’s Hellbender, 2022 brought You Won’t Be Alone and Nightsiren, and last year there was Demian Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. Has it always been going on like this–as an anniversary or biannual event, something so many of these films are structured around–without my noticing? And doesn’t it make sense that we use our cave painting and darkest night, our medium of mythologizing and memorial, to put milestones on our terror? Doesn’t it?
In 18th-century Austria-Hungary, there was a spate of child murders perpetrated by powerless women who, to facilitate suicide, committed pedicide in order to be absolved of their sins before their executions. Suicides had no such recourse to the Lord. (The best film of this kind remains Narciso Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child?, which is never very far from my mind as I reach the age of apologizing to my kids for the shitshow they’re inheriting.) Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala focused on childhood in their first two films, Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge: how children are largely victims of the sins and shortcomings of their ostensible protectors. As their The Devil’s Bath opens, a woman, Ewa (Natalija Baranova), throws an infant down a waterfall in a small clearing. The fulcrum of the piece is how far and how quickly Man abandoned nature as the first testament of God’s presence in the world. Nature is a perfect system of birth and death. It doesn’t care about you or me. Men have perverted it into a sentient force and sought to influence chaos through organized religion, laws, superstitions, and social hierarchies. The more things change, yes? Ewa confesses her infanticide and is beheaded, her corpse left on display in an open shrine and her head sat beside it in a metal cage to deter birds from eating her eyes or souvenir hunters from carving the meat from the skull. They must settle instead for her fingers and toes, these souvenir hunters, not to mention the witches, the healers, and, as it happens, the brother of Agnes (Anja Plaschg), who snips a finger off and presents it to Agnes as a wedding present to encourage a quick pregnancy.
Thirtysomething Agnes is a little long in the tooth to be just getting married in this time and place. We see by the cold, utilitarian example set by her mother-in-law, Mother Gänglin (Maria Hofstätter), some possible reasons she’s been left unmolested. Agnes is gawky, lanky, uncomfortable in her skin, and unschooled and uninterested in the labours expected of a wife. She wants to gaze at the sky and take long walks in the woods by herself. Agnes collects small things, insect carcasses and moth wings and the like. She admires a carp-bone hair comb another woman has created for herself; she puts pretty flowers in a vase to decorate the Spartan interior of her hovel, which her mother-in-law immediately trashes for its uselessness. Agnes doesn’t want to mind livestock, picking maggots off goats, nor does she want to sweep out the dirt from the dirt floor of her homestead–a never-ending, even ironic chore. She isn’t good at preparing meals, working at the fishery, and on and on. We would say she lacks executive function. She’s a dreamer. In another circumstance, she would be an artist. She’s good at praying, though. She prays all the time. Agnes wants to give her new husband Wolf (David Scheid) a child, but Wolf isn’t interested in sex. She wants to like the house he’s mortgaged their future to buy, but it’s dark and cold and so close to her mother-in-law’s that she finds herself hunted and judged every moment. “Does she dislike me?” Agnes asks Wolf, and Wolf says, “It’s not like that.” What it is like for women in 18th-century Austria-Hungary (and the 21st-century United States, if our religious wingnuts have their way) is that they are cast exclusively as broodmares and helpmeets, stripped of choice in their lives and robbed of any identity distinct from their husband. They’ll tell you that “Mrs.” is short for “Mistress,” but I think it’s the possessive of “Mr.”
There’s an image that encapsulates this where Agnes starts her period as she’s working. Squatting in a field, she despondently watches as a worm struggles through the black mud made of her menstrual blood. It’s an image so powerfully chthonic, so unspeakably profane; Agnes’s only value on this plane of existence is literally as food for worms. The historical record adapted for this film lists over 400 instances where women took advantage of the abovementioned theological loophole (dubbed “suicide by proxy”) to flee this existence into the glory of the next. What The Devil’s Bath warns of is how if you dehumanize a person, if you make their existence insufferable, if you build a prison of this world, then certain numbers of your prisoners–who are not beasts, after all–will find a way to escape it. By their grace, they may take someone with them when they go.
The power of The Devil’s Bath is manifold. There’s the overwhelming majesty of Martin Gschlacht’s 35mm cinematography, capturing period Austria with some of the poetic naturalism of Néster Almendros’s work on Days of Heaven. There’s the exquisiteness of Plaschg’s performance as a woman in incredible pain at a moment in history where women are only truly allowed to experience pain in childbirth. There are the unpleasant, filthy-seeming, often-gory particulars of the picture’s setting and era, rendered exquisitely and without judgment so that its horrors are neither overstated nor, on the other hand, romanticized as some kind of virtue. Agnes steals a baby late in the film and tries to present it as evidence that God has finally given her a break. Almost without looking up, Mother Gänglin tells her to put it back where she found it as she goes about methodically slaughtering a goat and hanging it up to bleed out. Agnes stares at the looks of dumb surprise and agony in the fish preserved and hung in her kitchen, and we wonder if that’s all there is for us in our lives: struggle and then an animal’s shock that it’s over. Agnes is desperate for beauty in her life. She finds it even in the corpse of the executed woman, left in her shame with a pictogram depicting her transgression. In Agnes’s eyes, the beheaded, decomposing corpse acquires a certain dignity. The dead woman has won, no? In the darkest sense, of course, but isn’t this bower housing her body a room of her own at last? As Agnes stares into the dead, yellowed eyes of the head in the cage, we can mark the moment she makes a decision about her own life.
Agnes tries treatment for her melancholia: leeches and the hair of another dead woman, threaded through the back of her neck and drawn back and forth until an infection develops. The pus is meant to be sadness, I think. It isn’t working if it’s not festering. I thought about how the black strand breaching pale skin looks like a thread pulled through leather, and how it makes a crude sort of sense to prescribe a productive action (sewing) to cure a paralyzing depression. Mostly, I was struck by the unnaturalness of us, who, in our fear, invented prayers and ritual medicines and habitually blame the most vulnerable among us for every terrible thing we can’t cure or explain. The film ends with a celebration. Every society has an outcast, and in every society, when that outcast is driven out or killed, the society is relieved for itself and for its victim, too. Towards the end of the film, Agnes delivers a confession that is blistering in its despair but astonishing for its hope. Agnes doesn’t want to be sad anymore. Her death serves everyone’s purpose, even hers: she is free, and the cannibalistic blood cult of Christianity is fed in a ritual of self-satisfied sanguinity and rebirth at her public execution. I was stunned when a fair broke out–an orgy of celebration, of capitalism in the collection and sale of holy relics, complete with musicians and manic dancing. Bathed in blood, the good people celebrate the violent expulsion of sensitive, sweet, starry-eyed Agnes. Agnes, who wanted a child, who wanted to live among beauty and be seen as valuable. The Devil’s Bath is all of this world, and we are drowning in it. We who aren’t of the faith didn’t create it, though we’re blamed for it. We fought for a while, but it’s over now. Really, in the face of such extraordinary godliness, we never had a chance.
