Cinema – Film “The Devil’s Bad”: Reign of the Ugly Trinity

The early modern period is full of strange, bizarre and even disgusting traditions and beliefs. Of course, this is so easy to write from the illuminated, enlightened, warm room of postmodernism. The shocked look back is probably always a fear of one’s own primitiveness. And so “Des Teufels Bad”, the new film by horror experts Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (“Ich seh Ich seh”, “The Lodge”), is a dark, gruesome and sometimes bloody look back at ourselves.

In Upper Austria in the 18th century, the living conditions are barren, the dwellings are dark and damp, and life is generally not very need-oriented and rather brutal. People wade through the mud of the local carp pond to pull fish out of the water and sell them. The water is surrounded by deep, dark forest. Everything in this life feels oppressive and cold. The hard work is only briefly interrupted when the bells of the church tower ring to make the sign of the cross. Agnes (Anja Plaschg, actually a fantastic musician with the stage name Soap&Skin, in the film a highly sensitive, dreamy and deeply religious farmer’s wife), who falls into the family of Wolf Lizlfellner (David Scheid, actually an Austrian comedian, here the taciturn head of the family), prays the longest of all his mother’s thumb) was married into.

Because the outside world wants it that way, Agnes desperately wants a child, which her wolf, who is actually more inclined to men, which is only delicately hinted at, cannot give. Because her desire to have children remains unfulfilled, but also because the new family with the overbearing mother-in-law (Maria Hofstätter, as always magnificent in her human harshness) deprives her of any breathing space, Agnes withdraws more and more into herself. At the beginning she collects the beautifully iridescent scales of the fish at the lake to feel a little joy, but over the course of the film Agnes can hardly get out of bed.

In the Middle Ages, folklore had a suitable metaphor for melancholic people: they were trapped in the devil’s bath. You automatically start thinking about the fact that not much has changed in how we deal with the issue of depression in our enlightened world, except that the devil now has a name, but nobody talks about capitalism when it comes to it Not everyone manages to function well. If anticipation is permitted: A sentence from Agnes’ shocking final monologue resonates for a long time: “I just wanted to get away from the world.”

With Agnes’ fate, “The Devil’s Bad” puts a previously largely unnoticed, grisly spotlight on a part of European women’s history.

With Agnes’ fate and that of the other women, which is briefly touched on in the film, “The Devil’s Bad” puts a previously largely unnoticed, grisly spotlight on a part of European women’s history. It is known that suicide in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages (and far beyond) was associated with breaking the fifth commandment (Thou shalt not kill) and was socially outlawed. God’s fate is not so easy to escape. The dead bodies were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground; they were paraded in public and whipped or hung. The survivors were deprived of all their possessions in order to increase their public shame.

With all this knowledge, there seemed to be only one way out for women who, out of patriarchal tradition, were solely concerned with raising children If you killed someone else’s child, it was possible to make confession before the execution and be absolved of all sins. Because murderers were still allowed to do that. There are over 400 such indirect suicides known in German-speaking countries alone. »The victims were mostly children, as it was assumed that they were still in a state of innocence. You could possibly even do the child a favor because he or she will still go to heaven sinless,” writes medieval historian Kathy Stuart from the University of UC Davis in California, the world’s leading expert in this field, in the press release for “The Devil’s Bath «. Thanks to Stuart’s research, which they heard about in a podcast, Fiala and Franz became aware of the material for the film. “The Devil’s Bad” is largely based on surviving court documents. The case of the Austrian Ewa Lizlfellner, who found herself trapped in an unhappy marriage, is the basis for the character of Agnes. “Look what Satan can do… I immediately followed him and continued doing what I always regret now, asking that God forgive me for this great sin,” Lifzlfellner is said to have said in court.

The film, which is Austria’s choice for the foreign Oscar, translates the mental anguish and hopelessness that Agnes feels into brutal and bleak images of a poor rural life in the late 18th century. At the beginning, Agnes is hugged farewell by her mother. Before she releases her into marriage with Wolf, she tells her: “I love you, my child,” and you get a rough idea of ​​how hard the transition into the new world full of work and emotional coldness will be for Agnes. Every day she scoops the fish carcasses out of the water, distributes bread to the helpers after work (under the strict eyes of her mother-in-law, those who don’t conform to her morals get nothing), and is reprimanded when she doesn’t do the right thing in the kitchen – that mother-in-law – keeps order and begins to hurt herself out of emotional lack, then tries to kill herself with rat poison, which fails.

Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht won the Silver Bear for his work at this year’s Berlinale. It is his dark images that are painful and look at for far too long, thereby revealing their cruelty. And so you move from one pain to the next, wishing that the sun would shine at least once in the two hours and thinking that things couldn’t get much worse, until you almost long for Agnes’ release and feels what Ewa Lizlfellner must have felt.

“The Devil’s Bath” feels at times like a very long ride on the ghost train, rituals, lifestyle habits and religious fervor seem so far away. But because some images come back to your head even after weeks, a much more sinister feeling creeps in: This is not about a long-gone, unenlightened time, it is about the rule of the ugly trinity, which is far from being overcome: children, the church , Kitchen.

“Des Teufels Bad”, Austria 2024. Directors: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. With: Anja Plaschg, Maria Hofstätter, David Scheid. 121 minutes. Start: November 14th