Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the directors behind Goodnight Mommy, trade contemporary suburban dread for something colder and more historically specific: rural Austria in the 1750s, shot in muddy grays and greens that make every frame feel like a period painting left out in the rain. Anja Plaschg, better known internationally as the musician Soap&Skin, plays Agnes, a new bride whose isolation curdles into despair over a marriage that offers her no companionship, no purpose, and no way out under the rigid religious doctrine of the time. The film moves at the pace of actual rural life, long stretches of fishing, laundry, and silence, which makes its slow descent into psychological horror feel less like a plot than an inevitability.
What makes this unsettling beyond its visuals is its grounding in real 18th-century court records: the central horror is a documented historical pattern in which desperate women, forbidden from taking their own lives by religious doctrine, committed murder specifically to be executed by the state and guarantee themselves a path to heaven through confession and punishment. Franz and Fiala present that logic without judgment or modern commentary, letting the alien cruelty of the belief system do the unsettling work. Plaschg's own eerie, minimal score, much of it her singing folk melodies over a hurdy-gurdy drone, becomes as important to the film's dread as the visuals, turning quiet domestic scenes into something close to a funeral rite.
A period horror film that finds its monster in 18th-century religious law, not in anything supernatural.
This suits patient horror audiences drawn to folk-horror atmosphere over conventional scares, closer to The Witch's slow religious dread than anything with a body count in the traditional sense. It rewards viewers with some tolerance for historical drama pacing, since a good hour passes before the horror elements become explicit, but the payoff is a portrait of despair rarely attempted in the genre. Recommended alongside other Franz-Fiala work for anyone who found Goodnight Mommy's chilly restraint more effective than louder, more conventional horror filmmaking.
The Devil's Bath (Des Teufels Bad) was written and directed by Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, best known internationally for their 2014 breakout Goodnight Mommy. Produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion and Germany's Heimatfilm as an Austria-Germany co-production, the screenplay is drawn from real 18th-century criminal trial records, including the cases of Agnes Catherina Schickin in Württemberg and Eva Lizlfellnerin in Puchheim, as well as historian Kathy Stuart's research on the documented pattern of "suicide by proxy" among religiously devout women of the period. Lead actress Anja Plaschg, performing under her musical alias Soap&Skin, also composed and performed the film's original score.
The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2024, drawing significant critical attention on the festival circuit and strong reviews from outlets including IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter, which highlighted Plaschg's performance and the film's unflinching historical detail. It was picked up by Shudder for North American streaming distribution later that year, introducing the film to a wider horror audience than a typical festival-circuit arthouse release would normally reach. Critics frequently placed it alongside the Franz-Fiala team's earlier work as a continuation of their interest in quiet, character-driven dread rooted in real psychological and historical horror rather than supernatural spectacle.
