The Devil’s Bath streams on Shudder beginning Friday, June 28. The latest film from Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz is their darkest yet, and that’s saying something. The Austrian filmmaking duo specializes in bleak and disturbing material, pairing transgressive topics with unflinching violence for the type of movies that stun viewers into silence.
Fiala and Franz’s previous horror features, Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge , broke taboos around mothers, children, and the presumption of safety between them. So does their latest, The Devil’s Bath. But that’s just the beginning.
The film deals with an obscure historical phenomenon known as “suicide by proxy,” in which suicidal people – mainly women – in early modern Europe took advantage of a perceived loophole in Catholic morality. The Church taught that life was pain, and the only hope the downtrodden had for happiness was in the afterlife. But suicide was an unforgivable sin – the only unforgivable sin, as a person could not confess and be absolved of it after death.
What was someone who feared Hell, but could no longer tolerate the pain of earthly existence, to do? To elaborate further would be to give away the entire plot of The Devil’s Bath – suffice to say, it goes to some very dark places, hinging on a logic that is unthinkable to 21st-century minds. On one level, this makes it a condemnation of Catholicism and its absolute control over the minds of the faithful. But a simple anti-religion screed, .
