‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: Grim Austrian Folk Horror Chillingly Evokes A Dark Chapter In European History – Berlin Film Festival
deadline.com“Please make me a good wife to Wolf,” murmurs Agnes (Anja Plaschg) on her marriage night, head bowed in front of the crucifix she has already set up in the conjugal bedroom of the tumbledown stone farmhouse where she will live from now on.
Wolf (David Scheid) is meanwhile carousing with his fellow villagers at the wedding celebration, in no hurry to join her. We are deep in the Austrian forest in the 1750s, where life is governed by the cruelties of each season and everything has its place.
The point of a woman is to work and have children; anyone who fails in these conjoined vocations is simply a dead weight. Agnes will do her best, but her airy spirits are soon sinking.
The Devil’s Bath, directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, is the powerful story of one woman’s madness, but it is also the story of a way of life where the only escape hatch is death.
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