It’s the severed finger that does it. Not because it’s gross, but because it’s presented so matter-of-factly. When Agnes (Anja Plaschg), the protagonist of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath , gratefully receives that body part from her brother on her wedding day as a good-luck charm for a hoped-for pregnancy, the film enters a fully alien place.
Strangely enough, before that, we’ve already been treated to a prologue featuring a distressed mother who throws her baby off a cliff and is punished by beheading and dismemberment. So we know this will be a cruel and strange movie. Franz and Fiala based their script on real events documented in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the bleak, muddy Austrian landscape seems to reflect the severe, unforgiving nature of this devout, deeply superstitious community.
But Agnes seems like a genuine innocent, as fragile as the dry leaves and delicate butterflies she likes to collect. That a severed finger would be a source of joy upends our initial impression of her and adds a subtle up-is-down quality to the film, which reflects the psychology of its characters. If you gave a supremely talented 18th-century villager from upper Austria a camera, they might make a movie like this.
The Devil’s Bath is a deeply fucked-up picture. I say that with admiration. Franz and Fiala first made waves with the 2015 psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy , and they’ve been mining a particular vein of surreal, simmering suspense .
