Throughout the 18th century, the world witnessed the Age of Enlightenment and the United States Declaration of Independence. Unmistakable signs of the modern era and the agony of the Ancien Régime which, however, contrasted with a widespread practice in several regions of Central Europe and Scandinavia. This practice mainly concerned women and expressed a discomfort closely linked to religious repression, according to which there had been a multitude of suicides which… would have taken a detour. Since the destination of suicides was hell, these women committed horrific crimes and surrendered to the authorities, finding the much-desired death in an execution that would save their souls.
The Devil’s Bath shows a label briefly contextualizing these shocking events, but it does so not at the beginning as usually happens with historical productions, but at the end. Once the film is over. This is a striking decision, one that Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala thought through carefully. “Of course it changes the way you see the film,” admits Fiala (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 would have to work harder as spectators,” adds Franz (Vienna, 1965).
“It’s harder to decide how you feel about what you see if there isn’t a clear explanation first. Things happen and you have 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 these women: Agnès, played by Anja Plaschg. The Devil’s Bath She describes how shortly after her marriage, she was seized with great anxiety, without being able to understand what was happening and without the people around her understanding it either. “It was important that the audience could approach the film without a guide,” insists Franz. “We wanted to disturb, because that’s what art is for us.”
Fiala then attempts to launch an artistic manifesto that can represent his cinema: “Safe art does not exist. It’s boring, our film doesn’t want to embrace the audience and say “you’re great, what you think is right and accurate, and the film thinks like you”. “That way you’re just telling people they’re right, and art shouldn’t do that.” These precepts, in a certain way, led them to The Devil’s Bath moving from horror films to historical fiction. And despite this, winning the grand prize in Sitges.
From Haneke to a new European horror
The Devil’s Bath was the best film in the official section of the last Sitges Festival, dedicated to fantasy and horror cinema. The historical concern of The Devil’s Bath This in principle distances it from this genre, while not representing a big step forward from what Franz and Fiala were doing before, or even from what might have happened in recent years in Austrian cinema. In this sense, Fiala remembers the first feature film he made with Franz, Good night, mom. It enjoyed great critical success in 2014.
Good night, mom It tells the story of how two twin brothers were reunited with their mother after she suffered a serious accident that required plastic surgery. When they returned home, they began to suspect that she was not their mother but an imposter, causing a psychological terror that was 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 made Good night, mom We felt that thanks to Ulrich Seidl and a part of Austrian cinema, artistic films were born which were in reality very close to horror,” explains Fiala.
“We thought that by taking just one step forward, we would jump straight into horror cinema.” Good night, mom was then born from the exacerbation of what some critics have called the “cinema of cruelty” – the phenomenon of cruelty is not far from here. Don’t say anything bad 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 (nor had their families) and had suffered various abuses.
With history, there is this cliché that people in the past were different and had nothing to do with us. It is an arrogant belief to assume that everyone who came before us was stupid.
Veronika Franz and Séverin 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. It was 2001, the same year she married him. “I never went to film school, so I learned everything by doing it, and I learned everything from Ulrich Seidl. So there are certain aspects of his way of working that we have integrated into our films,” he admits about the work he shares with Fiala, inaugurated in 2012 with the documentary Kern. “We always try to shoot everything chronologically, which really helps the non-professional actors and actresses we hire. We also usually mix them with professional performers,” he adds.
The protagonist, Anja Plaschg, indeed has a very brief CV before The Devil’s Bath: She is best known for her experimental music project Soap&Skin, and the idea before being signed as a lead 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 working methods, which also go through the same production company, Ulrich Seidl Film. Production.
Seidl produced all of Franz and Fiala’s films and, to top it all off, it turns out he’s also the latter’s uncle. Unlike usual director duos, Franz and Fiala are neither a couple nor a 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 for it, we rented movies from the nearest video store to discuss later,” Franz recalls with a laugh. “We have seen everything, from Friday the 13th to Jean Cassavetes.
This variety of films perhaps explains, rather than the common ground of Austrian culture, the strange turn that the careers of Franz and Fiala took. After Good night, mom the jump to the Anglo-Saxon market occurred with The sinister cabin and a little collaboration in Servantthe M. Night Shyamalan series. And finally The Devil’s Bathwhich, no matter how much Sitges appears in his list, is not a fantastic proposition. Not horror as such? On this, they are more doubtful. “We never put our films in boxes, nor do we want to label them personally. It’s something distributors have to do to make money, but we don’t think in those terms. We simply find a story or 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,” continues Fiala. “Because this was a true story, about a person who actually existed, and it would have been wrong to shape his life in a way that would fit into a conventional horror film or a legal drama. We just wanted to do justice to Agnes by trying to follow her… through her own terrors. So in a way it’s a horror film “The terror of a tormented person, forced to commit a crime. heinous crime.”
“It’s just that, structurally, it’s not a classic horror film. He does not respect these conventions because he wants above all to conform to what these women experienced. Franz therefore emphasizes that this will not constitute a detour for future films, moving away from horror completely. “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,” he jokes, and his nephew plays along. “We just need a good name for this label.”
The confusion around the genre to which it belongs The Devil’s Bath This is ultimately explained by the rigorous commitment the film demonstrates to its protagonist. We barely detach ourselves from Agnès’ subjectivity, and can only timidly project what is beyond her while recognizing, with a shudder, certain dynamics. “When we learned of these facts, we were not only moved: they spoke to us throughout the centuries. A woman living 250 years ago with current problems, like depression,” explains Franz.
This is in fact what happens to Agnes: an acute depression that explodes when she gets married and has to adapt to the social impositions that marriage brings. “The repression against women was much worse than that against men, because men had more freedom,” Franz adds as a possible reason for the suicides of that era – “proxy” suicides, as Kathy Stuart calls them in the book that was useful. as the main source of inspiration for the film – mainly women. In this element, we also find the feminist rage with which the The Devil’s Bathand the ways in which it can dialogue with the present.
“With history, there is this cliché that people in the past were different and had nothing to do with us. And it’s an arrogant belief to assume that everyone who came before us was just stupid,” Fiala offers. “Agnès proves the opposite: she was not an artist or a gifted person, just a normal person who felt what we feel today. Even though 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 approach our societies,” he concludes. It is the terror that defines The Devil’s BathFinally: that of a terrible past which has never become over.
