Adapting historian Kathy Stuart’s empathetic research on a strange suicide ritual that was not-too-shockingly prevalent in 18th-century Central Europe makes all the sense in the world. So, it’s rather shocking that before Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, no one recognized the potential for a despondent period horror that effortlessly blends the religious and the psychological in Stuart’s book. But The Devil’s Bath’s subject matter couldn’t have fallen into better hands. Franz and Fiala’s film tinkers around with conventional period horror motifs to mount a feeble defense against depression, though the mental health issue is hardly the only culprit.
Spoiler Alert
What happens in the film?
The Devil’s Bath opening scene holds the entire story within itself. In 18th-century Upper Austria, a woman with an empty look on her face kills an infant and confesses to her crime. Beheaded and left out for all to see, there’s something about this woman that draws Agnes to her. She’s freshly married Wolf, and the dream of domestic bliss flies out the window with Wolf’s disinterest in intimacy. Judging by the way Wolf flirts with Lenz on their wedding night, I think Agnes has been waylaid into marrying a man who’d never make her happy. 18th-century Catholic laws and rules and local superstitions defined the lives of the likes of Agnes. But praying is the only thing that comforts Agnes in a bleak life she is ill-prepared for. Mother Gänglin is a formidable mother-in-law, never missing a chance to spurn the ways Agnes handles her household. It’s not that Agnes doesn’t try to do everything that’s asked of her. But the growing sense that the life she’s been pushed into is choking the life out of her doesn’t budge. Agnes’ declining emotional state follows the patterns of the disappointments that fill her life up to the brim, and her feelings harden into a constant state of dysphoria.
Why does Agnes run away to her maternal home?
There’s not much in this life for Agnes. Having her needs and wishes ignored kind of makes her blend into the background like she’s not even a whole person. Agnes longs for life to grow inside her. And then there’s the fear that she’d be the one deemed broken if she doesn’t bear Wolf’s child soon. Before leaving her at Wolf and his mother’s mercy, Agnes’ brother gave her a finger that he hacked off of the woman who was executed for killing a baby. Maybe it’s a superstition that compels Agnes to keep the severed finger under her bed, hoping it’ll bless her with a child. But Wolf’s given up trying to be a true husband to Agnes. And Lenz’s suicide has affected him enough for him to grow even more cavalier about his wife’s well-being. When no amount of prayers soothe her disturbed soul, Agnes feels cornered into a joyless existence where none of her desires matter. Even her potential friendship with a sweet pregnant woman she meets is nipped in the bud by her mother-in-law. And the due acceptance that things will never get better sends Agnes running to her mother and brother. But the god-fearing peasant family couldn’t risk the ire of the community. Agnes was not much more than Wolf’s possession after their wedding. And her family, terrified of being shunned for letting their run-away married daughter stay, didn’t move a finger when Wolf dragged her back to his house.
How does Agnes’ mental health deteriorate?
There’s a grounded depiction of how it is to be severely depressed in The Devil’s Bath. Agnes’ condition is neither reduced to an easily digestible subtlety nor given the fever-dream-ish treatment that takes away from a realistic portrayal. Circumstances are of little concern to depression. Agnes has likely been brought up to be a doting wife and a relentless laborer. So you can imagine the kind of stigma that’d be attached to a peasant wife withering away in bed in an 18th-century Catholic society. But even that fear couldn’t get Agnes to move a limb. And desperate to be the good Christian wife that she was supposed to be, Agnes went through barbaric “medical” procedures. Her melancholy was never going to seep out of the festering wound on the back of her neck. Suffering in this inconceivable misery that crippled her, Agnes was convinced that having a baby was the only thing that’d make her want to live. She even brought home an infant she’d found in the woods all alone, believing it to be a blessing, hoping there was no one out there looking for the baby. And soon after having to give that one back with a sullen face, Agnes stole the Holy Infant from the local church. She was hallucinating at that point. And there might be a physiological reason behind her descent into emotional chaos. Agnes was suicidal. And to depart from the world that causes her such unthinkable pain, Agnes had been consuming rat poison. That might’ve messed her up enough to hallucinate things that she longed for. When she ran out of the hidden church bunker and got sick outside, Agnes saw herself buried in the ground. God was all that Agnes had faith in. And when she’d happened upon that church bunker, she’d made a makeshift altar in there just for herself. It was her safe space. It was where dead things, like that butterfly, came alive for Agnes. So seeing herself interred doesn’t actually terrify Agnes. Crushed under the guilt of sinning–of harboring suicidal thoughts–a Christian burial was all that Agnes wanted.
Why does Agnes kill the boy?
Despite its morbid mood, The Devil’s Bath’s ending comes with a strange satisfaction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a devastating end for Agnes. But it’s fascinating to watch how the writing has made sure that everything that’s happened, starting from the very first moment of the film, has led to this very climax. It couldn’t have gone any other way. The Devil’s Bath isn’t a tale of how to overcome depression against all possible odds. The film’s focus never shifts from what this story is really about. And that’s pretty much surmisable from the title of Kathy Stuart’s book, the one that inspires this film: “Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany.” Agnes has got suicide on her mind. But for a Christian woman in those times and in those regions of German-speaking Europe, the idea of suicide came with a lot more than just personal burdens.
The entirety of The Devil’s Bath foreshadows where Agnes’ story will lead. Even the butterfly, likely a metaphor for life in the story, was consumed by Agnes when she made up her mind about killing herself. She doesn’t want to live in this world anymore. But if she hadn’t been aware of it already, at Lenz’s funeral, the priest reminded the congregants how suicide was a far graver sin in Catholicism than murder. She saw Lenz’s mother beg for the burial that’d grant her son a place in heaven. And she saw how Lenz’s corpse was humiliated and left out to become vermin-feast, all because he committed the significant sin of rejecting the life that they believed was a gift from God. She’s also come across the poster detailing the crime committed by the woman in the opening shot of the film and its consequences. But it’s this consequence, an execution following a confession to wash the sins off, that Agnes and that woman were after.
Kathy Stuart’s book mentions an Agnes and an Ewa, two of the hundreds of women who committed “suicide by proxy” between the 17th and the 18th century. To kill a sinless would be freeing them from a future of sinning. So by killing the infant, that woman believed that she had secured her chances at going to heaven. And Agnes does the same thing by luring away and killing that little boy whose confusion over the whole thing worsened his pain. Agnes finally achieved the death she was after by confessing to the crime. But in terms of unloading an emotional rock from her chest, her confession to the priest was what actually got her some relief. She’s been conditioned to think she’s a nuisance for not being grateful for merely being tolerated. And as a “good Christian woman,” she’s been carrying an overwhelming load of guilt over not being a good wife and a good daughter-in-law. She’s been indoctrinated in the historical misogynistic “values” of Roman Catholicism. And she, like many other severely depressed women around that time, believed that by confessing and being absolved before execution, she could dodge “suicide” in terms of technicality and attain heaven.
In The Devil’s Bath‘s ending, Agnes is beheaded in front of a cheering, superstitious crowd of peasants, waiting with their cups to fill with her blood. Since the law itself was under Catholic influence back then, even execution was deemed a religious practice, which explains why superstitious rituals would be associated with the sin-free slain criminals. Agnes believed that keeping a finger that belonged to the woman from the opening sequence would grant her natal blessings. And now that she was the one executed, the crowd drank up the blessing in the form of her blood, and they even paid a pretty penny for it.
