A beautiful and staggeringly bleak descent into the madness of a claustrophobic society.
When Agnes marries Wolf, she finds herself in an emotionally cold household with an overbearing mother-in-law and a husband who prefers the company of other men. It isn’t long before this prison begins to overwhelm sensitive Agnes, whose melancholy turns into a tragedy that threatens to engulf everyone around her.
Director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala continue to prove that they’re experts in understanding the broken human psyche. Whether it’s the striking paranoia in Goodnight Mommy or the cruelty of The Lodge, the duo explore human nature with an unrelenting gaze that never wavers. The Devil’s Bath is no exception: set in upper Austria in the 1700’s, depression, religious fervor and societal pressures are explored to the limit, in a story of a young woman trapped – both literally and figuratively – in such a way it could hurt not only her, but everyone close to her.
