Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Starring: Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter
The sound of a baby crying is a pagan resonance, a cutting disharmony
which seems to reach from beyond the veil to claw into your ears before
burrowing down into both heart and soul with ceaseless, primal urgency.
Programmed to respond to the clamouring vulnerability, to us the noise
feels like a punishment. Your friends with new-borns tell you about
sleepless nights with gormless expectations of sympathy. Worse, you hear
about mothers with post-natal depression driven further into the
punitive dark by this very soundtrack, an unending whine which crushes
out all other sounds and rationality.
The Devil's Bath opens with such a wail, along with an
attendant close-up of an infant crying upon a forest floor. It's an
image of natural cruelty which sets the tone for this abrasively grim
retelling of an 18th century Europe occurrence, wherein things will only
get painstakingly bleaker. Thankfully - because, no matter what else,
this noise needs to stop - a woman picks the child up from the bracken.
Her ease with holding the baby suggests she may be its mother, but the
kid doesn't stop crying. Not as she walks soothingly with it to the top
of a crashing waterfall. And not as she pelts the kid over the side to
be dashed upon the rocks and rushing water below. As she admits her
crime to the authorities, there is at least silence.
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's folk horror (a pure
example of the genre, in which horror is exclusively generated by
"folk"), is predicated upon the phenomena of "suicide by proxy"; a
gloomy theological loophole where people at odds with existence enact a
capital crime in order to be executed instead of taking their own lives,
with all the consequent damnation suicide supposedly entails. In its
blunt opening, The Devil's Bath links the phenomena
explicitly with motherhood and societal expectations of women (Wikipedia
duly informs that IRL the "crime was committed predominantly by women").
We then pick up with Agnes (Anja Plaschg, playing a fictionalised
version of the historical Eva Lizlfellnerin), an Austrian peasant who is
newlywed. With sly hilarity, the marriage is shown to be empty from the
off, with the ominous indication of a lifetime's anti-climax as hubby
Wolf (David Scheid) shows Agnes the humble living arrangements
that she has signed up for. In the marital cot later, Agnes, sweetly
nervous and excited, is ordered to turn around as Wolf, instead of
consummating the union, masturbates over her backside. Earlier on, Agnes
spotted him confessing ostensibly fraternal love to a male friend,
telling him how good looking he is etc, in that poignantly chummy manner
of the deeply repressed...
Perhaps the name of Anges's husband is a furtively intertextual nod, as
the milieu of The Devil's Bath is the treacherous rustic
of Angela Carters 'The Bloody Chamber': "cold; tempest; wild beasts in
the forest. It is a hard life." Wedding jovialities involve an
unpleasant game of blind man's bluff, where participants wield a scythe
against the ground until the blade decimates a live cockerel. Fishing is
an immersive, clumsy wholesale capture and live evisceration of
squirming shoals. This is a world where cruelty is an everyday
fundamental, a reeking pastoral setting which is both fecund and faecal:
in one moment of shocking silliness, we see a happy Agnes actually spray
goat's milk into her mouth straight from the doe's tit(!). And that
suicidal mother in the opening? Her beheaded corpse rots at the top of
the waterfall as an abiding example to all. The villagers take trinkets
from the body - a toe, perhaps - as a charm. Including Agnes, who chops
a finger and places it beneath the mattress in the hope that it will
kickstart Wolf's apparently wayward libido. Superstition reigns within a
context where magic and God are accepted as real, but homosexuality is
unthinkably taboo.
And so, as a second act trigger, Wolf's handsome mate Luke (Lukas Walcher) mysteriously takes his own life. The body is immediately and
raucously carted off (literally carted off) by braying men, as if the
damnation is catching. You wonder how much misery our heteronormative
expectations promulgate, even today; this sick and boring idea that
marriage, children, with men and women restricted into being certain
archetypes, is something aspirational, that it's "normal."
The Devil's Bath also questions the assumption with Agnes
desperate for a child, her repeated failure to conceive (perhaps she
doesn't know what is meant to happen - she has no maternal figure to
guide her, after all, just a witchy stepmother via the folkloric mien)
developing into psychosis: "I have poisoned everything with my mad
thoughts’," she bemoans.
Throughout The Devil's Bath there is a motif of being
blindfolded, a symbol of being trapped and unable to envision the
veracity of one's surroundings: a concise metaphor for the suicidal
mindset. In the final third of the film, we focus on Agnes's downward
spiral (heralded by a splash of menses as she comes on while working in
the field: we witness maggots immediately churn in the blood. Yeah, it
can be a bit much). I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the
gradually deteriorating sanity of a woman has become a customary trope
in horror over the last decade. In certain situations, it feels like an
undermining correction to the Final Girl: a representation of weakness
linked to hysteria... Obviously that isn't the case here, where the
depiction is not only earned but has a responsibility to the historical
context, too. Nonetheless, the third act becomes conventional of this
inevitable archetype, and, after the violent poetry of previous scenes,
we are left to watch yet another woman going mad. It's an unfair
judgement to level at The Devil's Bath because its
criticism of patriarchy is reflective of actual events, and the
narrative sympathetically essays the psychology of Agnes with depth and
careful detail. In its emotional verisimilitude, we are reminded of how
this expressive genre is uniquely equipped to translate and examine the
real-life horrors of herstory.
The Devil's Bath is on Shudder
from June 28th.
