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‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Beautiful but Staggeringly Bleak Vision of Female Depression in 18th Century Austria
A pious newlywed spirals into devastating despair in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's relentless, impressively savage downer.
With only a couple of feature acting credits to her name, Anja Plaschg (who as Soap&Skin also provides the soulful scraping strings and broken, breathy folk hymns on the soundtrack) is astonishingly convincing as Agnes, the young woman we first meet happily weaving berries and twigs into her bridal headdress. Franz and Fiala’s screenplay is gripping in its austerity, but it contains nothing in the way of surprise: once you understand the rapidly descending track this narrative is set upon, it continues plotting a viciously straight line from that brief dazzle of wedding-night hope down to previously unplumbed depths of despair without the slightest deviation. From the textures of Tanya Hausner’s costume design – scratchy hessian fabrics crudely cinched in with drawstrings – to the warp and weft of light and earth in Martin Gschlacht’s extraordinary photography, the world of “The Devil’s Bath” seems less filmed than it is woven out of the elements.
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