“Because my problems made this life unbearable for me, I decided to commit murder.” For centuries, until less than fifty years ago, the Catholic Church has terrified believers with eternal punishmentinfinite suffering, if they put an end to his life. In the 17th and 18th centuries, in Austria, thousands of people, most of them women, murdered others, often children, to be executed and thus avoid suicide.
Suicides blessed by God, creepy, that had never been told before in the cinema and that now the filmmakers Severin Fiala and Veronika Franzbased on hundreds of interrogations carried out on many of the convicted women, show from fiction to The devil’s bath. Eerie horror story that is not strictly horror cinema, but that has won in one of the most important festivals of the genre, that of Sitges. BesidesMartin Gschlachthe director of photography, won a Silver Bear in Berlin for his “outstanding artistic contribution.”
female depression
Starring by Anja Plaschgthis is also a story of female depression –”this is stuff from satan“–, of the oppression to which women have been historically subjected and of the excessive and irresponsible power of religions. “Everything that is seen on the screen is taken from court archives. There are very few sources of what was happening at this time, but all of these women were tried by courts in towns and there are archives of it. And those interrogations show their daily life, the sadness…”
“The topic we really touch on is depression.an elementary problem that society even today does not know how to face,” the filmmakers say in a telephone interview. “It is very difficult to understand. At that time they wondered why a woman was incapable of getting up, of working, why she couldn’t take care of her family… And today it still happens a lot. The most beautiful reaction we have had to our film is that of the people who have suffered from depression and when they leave the cinema they thank us and tell us that this film became a tool to show their surroundings what they had felt, something that they could not explain, because they had no way of putting words about what they felt.
The dogmatisms
The devil’s batha very dark story, set in an impressive nature that also oppresses the characters, was born from an episode of the podcast ‘This American Life‘, based on the historical research by Kathy Stuart. “All the interrogations we read seemed extremely modern and that was surprising to us,” they say. Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz. “It seems very arrogant on the part of today’s society to think that we live a life so different from that of these women, from that society. Society continues to cause the same pressure, unhappiness continues, misfortune also exists…. Human beings are human beings, wherever they are and at whatever time,” they add.
Today, filmmakers speak with this 18th century story to 21st century viewers, in which the role of religion is maintained, although it has lost oppressive power to the mechanisms of capitalism. “It’s a movie about dogmatisms and the pressure they exert. Today more than religion is capitalismwhich demands that we be perfect in our daily lives, in our work… Today it is simply power, dogmatism, whatever it may be, and the pressure it exerts that does not allow us to be free.”
Furthermore, the character experiences a situation of estrangement from his home that also brings the story closer to the present day. “Agnes got married fifteen kilometers from her hometown. That is nothing today, but in her time it was an enormous distance and the reality is that It’s like I’m an immigranta woman in a foreign family, something that happens a lot today. He is the person whom society looks at with different eyes,” explains Veronika Franz.
celebrate life
All of this, the exhausting work, the nostalgia for her home and her family, the submission to her husband’s wishes and the demands of her mother-in-law, the loneliness, the increasingly invasive sadness… darken the life of Agnes, who is also involved in an atmosphere of violence typical of that time. “It was a violence that shocks us today, but it was like that. We wanted that atmosphere of violence to be palpable. It is terror, the feeling of terror that exists in this woman’s life. It’s something we felt when reading the court documents, in which these women made extremely detailed confessions. We have not put everything in the film because the truth is even worse than what we show, but even the execution scene existed, it is described in those papers.”
It is a terror that, in reality, nests in the depths of the human being. The devil’s bath It begins with a party, that of the wedding, and ends with another party, the one that follows the execution. “They are the same people, the same guests, the same musicians. It is documented that at the time the executions brought together many people, the blood of the executed woman was sold as medicinetroops of clowns went to the towns to liven up the atmosphere…”, explain the filmmakers. “It seems like something very human to us. It’s like terror, sometimes when there is more tension, the more afraid you are, the more you laugh. It is a totally human writing, the horror calls for laughter. The human reaction is celebrate life in the face of a horrible event“, they conclude.
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