By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and film critic
The Terrible Weight of a Soul: On The Devil's Bath
There is a certain kind of cinema that does not seek to entertain. It seeks to bear witness. The new film from the Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, The Devil’s Bath, is a staggering and deeply unsettling example of this kind of work. It is a film that takes its time, that is patient in its cruelty, that forces you to sit in a profound and uncomfortable silence. And in doing so, it achieves something that few films ever do: it gives a face, and a body, to the formless, suffocating weight of depression.
The film, which has been garlanded with awards at festivals and is Austria’s submission for the Academy Awards, is a harrowing character study set in the bleak, oppressive world of rural Austria in the 1750s. It is a world defined by faith, by punishment, by the rigid, unforgiving structures of a society that has no language for the kind of darkness that is consuming its protagonist. To watch this film is not just to watch a story. It is to be submerged in a state of mind.
The Unravelling of a Life
The title itself is a historical artefact. “The devil’s bath” was an old, chillingly poetic term for what was then called ‘the melancholy disease.’ This is the affliction of Agnes, played with a shattering, almost silent, brilliance by the musician Anja Plaschg. At the beginning of the film, she is a young woman on the cusp of a new life, a bride marrying the man she loves. But this new life quickly reveals itself to be a prison.
The world she has entered is one of suffocating obligation. There are the domestic duties, overseen by a severe and intrusive mother-in-law. There is the profound, almost spiritual, loneliness of a marriage to a husband who barely acknowledges her. And above all, there is the crushing, omnipresent weight of a religious faith that offers no comfort, only judgement.
Fiala and Franz are masters of atmosphere. They do not need to explain Agnes’s descent into a deep, inescapable void; they make us feel it. The film is slow, yes, but its pace is not a flaw. It is the very subject of the film. We are forced to inhabit Agnes’s time, to feel the long, empty hours, to watch as her will to perform even the simplest tasks slowly erodes. Her long, vacant stares into the middle distance are not moments of inaction; they are the entire drama. We are watching a soul slowly, and inexorably, extinguish itself.
The Logic of Madness
The central, horrifying question of the film is not why Agnes is suffering, but what she will do about it. In this devoutly Christian society, suicide is the ultimate, unforgivable sin. It is a rejection of God’s gift of life, an act that offers no possibility of confession, no chance of absolution. A soul that takes its own life is damned for eternity. Even on earth, there is no proper burial, no final peace.
In this oppressive, victim-blaming environment, a terrible and logical loophole emerged. For those who were so consumed by their own darkness that death seemed the only escape, there was another path. By committing a mortal sin - by committing murder - one could be sentenced to death by the state. And in that space between the sentence and the execution, one could confess, one could receive absolution, and one could die in the belief that they were saved. It was a cruel, but terrifyingly effective, piece of spiritual calculus.
This is not a fictional conceit. The film is inspired by real historical research into a phenomenon, particularly among women in 17th and 18th century Germany, of the “suicide-by-murder.” This chilling, and largely forgotten, chapter of European history is the foundation of the film. And it is what elevates The Devil’s Bath from a simple historical drama into a profound and deeply relevant psychological horror.
The Modern Echo
Though it is set in the distant past, the film feels alarmingly contemporary. It is a stark and unflinching look at a subject that our own, supposedly enlightened, society still struggles to discuss with any real honesty: the reality of suicidal ideation. The statistics are a grim testament to our collective failure. In Spain, in the United States, across the world, suicide remains a leading cause of death, a silent epidemic that we are only just beginning to confront.
Fiala and Franz have not made a historical document. They have used the past as a lens through which to examine the present. They have stripped away the modern language of psychology and therapy, and in doing so, they have revealed the raw, elemental terror of a mind at war with itself. The film is a powerful reminder that while the language we use to describe our inner demons may have changed, the demons themselves have not.
The Devil’s Bath is a difficult and demanding film. It is gloomy, it is dark, and at times, it is almost unbearable to watch. But it is also a work of profound empathy and artistic courage. Plaschg’s performance is a tour de force of minimalism, a portrait of a soul in agony that will stay with you long after you have left the cinema. And the directors, with their masterful control of script, of character, of atmosphere, have created a work that is not just a film, but an experience. It is a journey into the heart of a historical darkness that feels frighteningly, and necessarily, close to our own. It is a film that will not be easily forgotten. Nor should it be.
