“ Goodnight Mommy ” directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala deliver another twisted tale of familicide on the rural edges of Austria with “ The Devil’s Bath .” Set in 1750, the movie draws from actual historical accounts of depressed women who avoided suicide by murdering children to get themselves executed, thereby granting them salvation from Hell. Franz and Fiala, whose last feature was 2019’s English-language cult-survivor horror “The Lodge,” evade traditional thriller elements like jump scares and plot twists.
Instead, this is a harrowing psychodrama that explores ritualistic child killings that allegedly overtook Europe in the 18th century as women’s reprieve from the bottomless pit of despair. For “The Devil’s Bath,” which premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and is now in theaters, the Austrian filmmaking duo plumbed troves of research courtesy of UC Davis professor and historian Kathy Stuart, who spoke about this “suicide by proxy” phenomenon on a blip of a “This American Life” segment in a 2012 episode entitled “Loopholes.” “It was mainly transcriptions of court trial protocols and interrogation protocols, and it was really stunning because it’s something you never learn in school,” Fiala said in a recent IndieWire interview.
“History’s always about the big wars and royalty and kings and queens and stuff like that. But [here we saw] very normal people who committed atrocious crimes, and [reading of] them talking.
