The Devil’s Bath
The Devil’s Bath
At first, trees appear to stretch tall up to heaven in straight lines. The segments of the trunks do not hit each other, bumble-bees connive in the space between the formidable pillars, and the blessings of the greenery are in abundance as the rays penetrate into the earth. But, as The Devil’s Bath continues, murky sticky wetness descends and a lot of sticks protrude from the trunk and crisscross to form what in this landscape is a squashy ugly net. Fate has turned the world into a voracious, soggy, and netted, monster’s gluey mouth. As the comfort is taken away from the land so is the comfort of the protagonist Agnes’s (Anja Plaschg) psyche.
The Devil’s Bath is precisely heart dropping, something that should accomplish oneself into the picture that depicts one of the most grotesque features exhibited in history in as clear terms as one can imagine and without ostentation in as poetically tinged sobriety as one can manage and which is due to her truly lyrical pity and tenderness, which makes the center, both emotional and artistic, even sharper and more timeless than classic.
Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, who have directed Indian horror classic Goodnight Mommy, have directed, written and filmed this film. Central a mid 18th century upper Austrian setting the story quite uniquely focuses on a young woman who leaves to start life anew. Agnes and everyone surrounding her are devout Catholics. She is very fond of her parent’s place as well as the surroundings that she grew up in, their nature, insect hazes and more so, the sour berries. She has stashes of dead moths like moth bodies and dragonfly bodies as well as spider bodies which she kept as pets and cared for and would gently surge them over her arms and face. She has never left her parents’ place until she was forced by circumstances to marry off that Wolf (David Scheid), a neighboring villager. She still carries, and on more than one occasion has returned to the insects that she brought along and that she has crammed into a tree bark bowl shaped like an insect with a bulge. They relax her as old-time friends do, pleasant reminders of remnants of past happiness.
Life after marriage is most certainly not the cup of tea Agnes was prepared for. Regardless of the fact that the wedding took place in the merry atmosphere, daily life with Wolf and his tyrannical mother, Mother Gänglin, played by Maria Hofstätter, is nothing short of an anticlimax for Agnes. She was in the hopes that she and the rest of the women around her, would be able to do the same, stay with their husbands as good wives, a good wife being one whose first and foremost role is to have children accompanies by cooking and doing household chores easily and quickly. But it appears that the prayer is rather short lived – on their first wedding night, and all the nights that follow it, Wolf refuses to have sex with her, something which confuses and breaks Agnes smarting in silence while Wolf sleeps. Besides, it is also true that Mother Gänglin is very demanding at Agnes because she wants her to behave as she does, as a working woman and a daughter in law to Wolf. But such normal functioning is something that Agnes, being an extraordinary woman she is, cannot do. Step by step, instead of how Mother Gänglin would’ve wanted it, they’re self up to Agnes. And in order to achieve those little is in her power and the emotional burden helps to explain why.
This is constant tugging that Mimi and Billy are having. They come once in a while when it is off and pshot, then they come screaming at the door, shoot the window ect. Plaschg’s Agnes explores through the warmth and brings composition in the feeling living with nature finding love and the holy.
The landscape in her new house is quite different however, and not pleasant at all. Wolf’s are commercial fishermen, but their fonte is in muddy and black ponds with huge catfish. Gänglin expects Agnes to work in addition to taking care of the household, and such work, -Agnes tries to please her husband and her mother in-law, has been rather cruel- shocks her. It is heartbreaking and straining, the camera feels, as is feels with Agnes, all this trouble of trying to play the new family role at the expense of self bears no positive reward because she cannot wear the mask, but also feel like she has to because as it turns out, that’s the only way life will be tolerable for her. And so she is so very fractured; hopelessly in pieces.
Some of the warmth and love that is in Agnes is rather heart rending since it is slowly eliminated by the new life. Wolf’s sexual inactivity makes her feel inadequate and even useless; there is a suggestion that Wolf might not exactly be straight. In order to escape Gänglin’s nature repressions where all basics are restricted, and nature and life is suppressed to a minimum, Agnes feels fatigued and gives in.
And as soon as Wolf mistakenly believes the shells of the insect, which before the fire used to be the most treasured possessions for Agnes and throws them into the hearth of their home, awful as it is, Agnes spends the following night crying herself to sleep, and moving her things — her cross, flowers, the last of the paper moths — to a cellar, making an altar of sorts, where she kneels down and prays, clinging to the hope of some kindness that is apparently not in a hurry to show up.
As much a sweeping epic of historical turn of the century, The Devil’s Bath, also tells the story of a woman straining to keep together, amidst the pressures of her society. Through Agnes, Fiala and Franz present an anguished yet completely beautiful perspective of the past that brings one in closeness with people who lived before us, sometimes very much disturbingly so. That combination of lenses paints a lot of understanding of history, rapidly from their historical angle as it goes into Agnes, exposing how and that specific emotional constructions interact with similar instances, with soft detail through this adorable little girl, to complaint with great patience.
The movie, in other words, is concerned with one of the effects of depression, which is that the mind of the concerned succumbs. In like fashion, Fiala and Franz draw from the work of historian Kathy Stuart, who writes about themes of ‘suicide by proxy’ within early modern Germany.
As was the case up to this moment in time, people would get depressed and entirely suicidal but thanks to conservative doctrines entrenched in the culture that commonly regard the act of suicide as an abomination in the afterlife due to the fact that there is no way to make a confession- the quitter would focus on murder knowing that such a crime is punishable by death. There was no suggestion that such a person could carry out the crime, then report to the police to get up to death before being killed or say there is severe repentance after death and be forgiven. So the person would await the inevitable and pray for death in vain and that is how the self-willing surrenders came to be. More often than not, it was women who conspired suicide for others with children as the victims.
The Devil’s Bath delves into the intriguing rationale of the method through a gory portrait of Agnes, who shirks no responsibility or judgement and willingly embraces the chore of the ever-appearing family and society, which contributing to her mental disintegration rather takes over. Film is a stress in self, so it’s understandable why that perception is present in Plaschg regarding Agnes. It is not like Agnes in her new life is subjected to anything particularly cruel or unusual, just different. Her mother in law is a tyrant, treats Wolf like a baby, and Wolf’s environment is definitely dissimilar to that of her childhood village.
Agnes is burning bridges and stepping out to face the challenges of the world alone for the first time, which means finding themselves in discomfort, confusion and even frustration when facing changes and challenges. However, Agnes is a bit of a rare breed and even what should just be stressful or frustrating is more than a cause of angst, it is agony. Her fashioning of a developed understanding of her personality and the events happening around her is rather distinct and rather different from the rest.
There is also an incredibly deep understanding of the depressive side of Agnes in the film and an almost surreal, but very clear examination of how depression creeps in. When Agnes is sad and depressed under a pile of disenchantment and when misery is the meaning of the day, the surrounding space closes in. Her adored outdoors turns against her – the new place she had migrated to is cloudy most of the time and overbearing with tree branches, shrubs, and bushy plants that assault her, while she attempts to meekly traverse this terrain. The humid marshes pull at her every footstep, almost effortlessly aiming to engulf her, which was done with the use of twirling mental gymnastics, interlacing thoughts that grew in size and ferocity, stifling the rationality of illumination.
There is a reflection of the motion of depression inside Agnes in her surroundings – the haze becomes overgrown and moist and permanent just like Agnes’s mind always solidifies her repeated thoughts of not making it; she gets lost in the woods more than once, even up to three times a day, running in circles the way she does in thoughts and then wades or rather sinks into that single realm of thinking that revolves about her failing over and over.
In short, the two authors design Fiala and Franz’s work in this regard as soft, slight, realistic and in the same time enchanting poetry. Never descending to needless emotional story on one particular aspect of mental health issues The devil8217s bath measures as it exposes both the absolute lunacy that the mentality creates regarding the external world and even more curiously the internal world and also makes the brutality and blind acceptance which the society offers to the mentally ill and their misunderstandings come out without fail. Such clinical detachment was for exposing rather than condemning the whig theory of psychological treatment practices leveling at the depressed. Explore the dark territory of suicide by proxy in a patient and unhurried way, without giving in either to the sensationalist line, or to the retrospective romanticizing of events that are detrimental to the film’s main heroine. The film achieves this contradiction: It seeks, however, to be equally tragic by fatal terms – when the women8221s thoughts seize the arms of society as theirs.
Plaschg’s Agnes is a manifestation of the most awesome blending of care and love, juxtaposed with the gradual contraction of the brows and radical widening of the eyes, portraying Agnes’ struggles. And as the disease that resides in her head deteriorates and becomes increasingly more tangled up and oil soaked, Plaschg’s Agnes’s head noticeably grows heavier, capsizing from the pressure of her sadness, and self-destructive tendencies manifest as self-loathing sets in. When she is forced to ignore one of the day-laborers, who is an employee of her mother-in-law whom she agreed to divide the bread with so that everyone gets a share, thus to maintain the rule of one loaf only for every person, Agnes hurls herself into the wilderness where she seizes a tongue scraping stick scraping it across her tongue mouth until it bleeds for having to utter such loaded simple and devastating refusal of kindness politely. Without decent language and in clear physical elegance, Plaschg portrays the domination of Agnes’ own mind over her body, and deterioration of her abilities as she is being engulfed by darkness and being sloppy.
Both Plaschg and this film are remarkable in the way they unmask the slow and silent rolling in of depression and a wish to commit suicide, show how it looks like simply and more importantly physically — they feel how oppressive loss feels like, depression caused even by what may seem to an outsider as mundane and routine events.
More than anything, it is this sadness that is the hitch in the rollercoaster path that appears to lead children toward the rather healthy process of suicidal thoughts that is within The Devil’s Bath. Such a weight is usually borne perhaps as a fictional device, even though it is thanked in the context of a history that is long over and done with, and the current sense of urgency and presence, the very life-ness, comes from the understanding of the presenter, Plaschg, and the filmmakers’ grasp of how to tell a story and make one feel the story.
Yet the film is also deeply painful, tempered by the compassion and empathy that is reserved for Agnes — infusing the narrative into Agnes dignity, without denigrating her mind scans and its thoughts and affective abilities, reveals through comparable poetry the delicate musings of her spirit, and therefore ensnares her with both precision and gentle human care, and so does justice to all the women and children whom it is devoted. The Devil’s Bath is a further demonstration of being able to narrate past events without anachronism yet with sensitivity to and appreciation for the cultures and perspectives of the people whose context embed those events. This one is brilliant cinematographic art.
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- Genre: horror, Mystery
- Country: United States
- Director: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
- Cast: David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter, Anja Plaschg, Birgit Minichmayr, Camilla Schielin, Tim Valerian Alberti, Lukas Walcher
