Throughout the 18th century the world witnessed the Enlightenment and the US declaration of Independence. Unmistakable signs of the Modern Age and the agony of the Old Regime that contrasted, however, with a widespread practice in several areas of central Europe and Scandinavia. This practice mainly involved women and expressed a discomfort closely linked to religious repression, according to which there were a multitude of suicides that… took a detour. Since the destination for suicides was hell, what these women did was commit horrible crimes and surrender to the authorities, finding the longed-for death in an execution that would save their souls.
The devil’s bath shows a label briefly contextualizing these shocking events, but it does not do so at the beginning as usually happens with historical productions, but at the end. Once the film has concluded. It’s a striking decision, one that Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala carefully considered. “Of course it changes the way you see the movie,” Fiala admits (Horn, 1985). “Putting it at the end was more in line with the experience that Veronika and I wanted to design for the audience, because until then I wouldn’t have known 100% what was happening.” “They were going to have to work more as spectators,” adds Franz (Vienna, 1965).
“It is more difficult to decide how you feel about what you see if there is no clear explanation beforehand. Things just happen and you need to ask yourself who you are in relation to what you see, without anyone telling you how you should feel.” What the viewer sees is the suffering of one of those women: Agnes, played by Anja Plaschg. The devil’s bath She tells how shortly after getting married, she is gripped by great anguish, without being able to understand what is happening and without the people around her understanding it either. “It was important for the audience to approach the film without a guide,” insists Franz. “We wanted to disturb, because that is what art is for us.”
Fiala then tries to launch an artistic manifesto that can represent his cinema: “There is no such thing as safe art. That’s boring, our movie doesn’t want to hug the audience and tell them ‘you’re great, what you think is right and accurate, and the movie thinks like you.’ “That way you just tell people that they are right, and art shouldn’t do that.” These precepts, in some way, have led them in The devil’s bath to jump from horror films to historical fiction. And, even so, to win the grand prize in Sitges for it.
From Haneke to a new European horror
The devil’s bath was the Best Film in the Official Section at the last Sitges Festival, dedicated to fantasy and horror cinema. The historical concern of The devil’s bath It distances it in principle from this genre, while at the same time it does not represent such a big leap with respect to what Franz and Fiala had been doing before, or even with what could have happened in recent years within Austrian cinematography. In this sense, Fiala remembers the first fiction feature he directed with Franz, Good night, mom. It was released to great critical success in 2014.
Good night, mom It told how two twin brothers were reunited with their mother once she had suffered a serious accident that had required plastic surgery. When they moved back home, they began to suspect that she was not their mother but an imposter, giving rise to a psychological terror as cold and minimalist as it was merciless. It was not difficult to identify among their references compatriots like Michael Haneke or someone even closer to these filmmakers. “When we did Good night, mom We sensed that through Ulrich Seidl and a part of Austrian cinema, artistic films had originated that were, in reality, very close to horror,” says Fiala.
“We thought that by just taking one step forward from here we would put ourselves directly into horror cinema.” Good night, mom arose then from the exacerbation of what certain critics have called “cinema of cruelty”—the phenomenon of cruelty is not far from here. Speak No Evil and its recent remake Don’t talk to strangers—, maintaining Haneke and, above all, the aforementioned Seidl as teachers. This Austrian filmmaker has been very controversial due to accusations that during the filming of his latest film, Spartathe child protagonists had not been informed that the story revolved around pedophilia (neither were their families), and they had suffered various abuses.
With History there is this cliché that the people of the past were different and had nothing to do with us. It’s an arrogant belief, to assume that everyone who came before was stupid.
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
— Filmmakers
Ulrich Seidl is also a regular collaborator of Veronika Franz. “I have co-written all of Ulrich Seidl’s films since dog days”confirms Franz. That was in 2001, the same year she married him. “I never went to film school, so I learned everything while doing it, and I learned everything from Ulrich Seidl. So there are some aspects of his way of working that we have integrated into our films,” he acknowledges in relation to the work he shares with Fiala, inaugurated in 2012 with the documentary Kern. “We always try to shoot everything chronologically, which helps a lot for the non-professional actors and actresses we hire. We also usually mix them with professional interpreters,” he adds.
The protagonist, Anja Plaschg, has, in fact, a very brief CV before The devil’s bath: She is best known for her experimental music project Soap&Skinand the idea before being signed as the protagonist was that she would only compose the film’s soundtrack. “But we write the dialogues, we have a very precise script, and with Ulrich Seidl I don’t usually do that,” Franz highlights the big difference between their ways of working, which also go through the same production company, Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion.
Seidl has produced all of Franz and Fiala’s films and, to add insult to injury, it turns out that he is also the latter’s uncle. Unlike the usual director duos, Franz and Fiala are neither a couple nor sister/brother. They are aunt and nephew, and their cinematic affinity comes from when Fiala was a teenager and his adoptive aunt hired him for a small job. “I needed a babysitter, but instead of paying him we rented movies from the nearest video store to discuss them later,” Franz recalls with a laugh. “We saw everything, from Friday the 13th to John Cassavetes.”
This variety of films perhaps explains, rather than the common bed of Austrian culture, the strange turn that Franz and Fiala’s career has taken. After Good night, mom the leap to the Anglo-Saxon market arrived with The sinister cabin and a small collaboration in Servantthe M. Night Shyamalan series. And finally The devil’s bathwhich, no matter how much Sitges appears in its record, is not a fantastic proposal. Not horror as such? About that they are more doubtful. “We never put our films in boxes, nor do we want to label them personally. That’s something that distributors have to do to make money, but we don’t think in those terms. We just find a story or a character, and follow them wherever they take us.”
Scary stories to understand the present
“Of course we tend to be interested in dark themes and provocative films, but The devil’s bath It was a very specific challenge,” Fiala continues. “Because here we were dealing with a true story, with a person who really existed, and it would have been wrong to mold his life in a way that would fit into a conventional horror movie, or a courtroom drama. We just wanted to do Agnes justice by trying to follow her…through her own terrors. So in a way it is a horror movie. “The terror of a tormented person, forced to commit a heinous crime.”
“It’s just that structurally it’s not a classic horror movie. It does not comply with those conventions because it wants to conform above all to what these women experienced.” Franz points out, then, that it is not that this is going to be a detour for future films, completely moving away from horror. “We are curious and ambitious people who just want to find our own way of telling stories. Maybe we need a new genre or a new label for it,” he jokes, and his nephew plays along. “We just need a good name for this label.”
The confusion around the gender to which it belongs The devil’s bath It is finally explained by the rigorous commitment that the film shows towards its protagonist. We barely detach ourselves from Agnes’s subjectivity, and can only tentatively project what lies beyond her while recognizing, with a shudder, certain dynamics. “When we learned about these facts we were not only moved: they spoke to us through the centuries. A woman living 250 years ago with current problems, depression style,” says Franz.
This is actually what happens with Agnes: an acute depression that explodes when she gets married and has to adjust to the social impositions that marriage brings with it. “The repression against women was much worse than that of men, because men had more freedom,” adds Franz as a possible reason for the suicides of that time—suicides “by proxy,” as Kathy Stuart calls them in the book. that served as the main inspiration for the film—mainly involved women. In this element we also find the feminist rage with which the The devil’s bathand the ways in which he can dialogue with the present.
“With History there is this cliché that the people of the past were different and had nothing to do with us. And it is an arrogant belief, to assume that everyone who came before was simply stupid,” proposes Fiala. “Agnes proves the opposite: she was not an artist or someone with a gift, just a normal person who felt the way we feel today. Although the challenges have changed, this world still puts a lot of pressure on its inhabitants and pushes them into depression. Because, sometimes, there is no other way to deal with our societies,” he concludes. That is the defining terror of The devil’s bathFinally: that of a terrible past that never became past.
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