In the Flesh: The Devil's Bath

David Foster Wallace once compared depression to standing at a window in a burning house. The only ways to escape are to jump, meaning certain death, or to turn and descend through the flames, with no guarantee but misery, for a chance at survival. It’s an idea that echoed through my thoughts as I watched Agnes (Anja Plaschg) struggle to navigate the moral and psychological landscape of rural domestic life in 18th century Germany in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath, a cinematic tour of hell on Earth based on the historical research of Kathy Stuart and her excavation of the practice of suicide by proxy, the largely feminine 17th and 18th-century crime of committing infanticide or another capital crime and then confessing to local authorities in hopes of an official execution and recognized absolution by a priest. For Agnes, trapped in a loveless, childless marriage to the amiable but homosexual and disinterested Wolf (David Scheid), bound by her obsessive devotion to the medieval Christian principles that dominate her world, disliked by her fellow townsfolk and unable to return to her family for comfort, the whole world is that burning house. There is nowhere to go. There is no way out but the fall or the fire.

Franz and Fiala render Agnes’s life in claustrophobic detail, their camerawork incredibly intimate and unromantic. We trudge with her through her backbreaking daily routine, bear witness to the toll her every failure and disappointment takes on her body, watch as her dreams gradually give way under the relentless onslaught of reality. We feel despair metastasize within her like cancer. Her mother-in-law’s (Maria Hofstätter) harsh criticism and dislike. Her inability to self-direct or to keep up with her tremendous workload. What solutions does her world have to offer her? A ghoulish medical treatment in which a thread is drawn through the skin over the spine and pulled back and forth to induce a festering wound, to drain her melancholy. Her attempt at suicide by rat poison is foiled, her desperate return to her childhood home rejected by her family, her wandering harshly punished. She has neither the small traditional comforts of domestic womanhood in her particular time and place nor the means or ideas about herself or the world to access any others. Instead we’re forced to watch as she slowly, reluctantly comes to the most squalid conclusion possible, her natural urges malformed and distorted by Christian doctrine forbidding suicide until she circumvents the problem by murdering a young boy with a felting needle.

And so, just as the film begins with Agnes borne aloft on the shoulders of her fellow villagers to celebrate her wedding, it ends with those same people hoisting her up and forming a procession to her execution. If at first you don’t succeed at integrating into your society, try, try again. Like the nameless woman in the prologue who throws a baby over a roaring waterfall to secure her own destruction, Agnes has carved out another niche for herself in the world she proved unable to navigate. She has become a fetish warding off the very things that consumed her, hollowed her out, and claimed her life, leaving her a sobbing, delirious ghoul drinking in the absolution of an unseen priest, her relief at having, in her mind, dodged Hell so squalidly palpable it feels like drowning in mud just to witness it. As they danced at her wedding the villagers dance around her headless corpse, paying to drink her blood to ward off melancholy, rejoicing and delighting in the reaffirmation of the social order, until the whole grisly, joyous affair ends with a bone-chilling scream, perhaps of delight, perhaps not, and a cut to black.