There’s bleak, there’s “European art-horror bleak,” and then there’s The Devil’s Bath, which looks at both and says, “Hold my severed finger.” Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have made a historical horror drama so committed to suffering that by the end you’re not sure if you’ve watched a movie or been sentenced to a carefully lit emotional penal colony.
Critics have largely adored it. You, meanwhile, may find yourself checking the timestamp like you’re Agnes herself, wondering how long until the sword finally drops.
Based on True Events, Loosely Based on Human Tolerance
The film is inspired by historical “suicide by proxy” cases: people who, trapped in a theological system where suicide meant damnation, committed murder to get executed with absolution. That’s fascinating, horrific subject matter. It’s also the sort of thing that needs a surgeon’s touch.
Instead, The Devil’s Bath approaches it with the finesse of a medieval barber: lots of cutting, plenty of fluids, and a very shaky understanding of anesthesia.
We begin with a woman throwing her baby off a waterfall, confessing, and later appearing as a decapitated corpse with her head caged nearby. Someone calmly snips off a finger, wraps it like a party favor, and you think, “Ah, I see, this is not the uplifting period piece.” It’s grim and arresting… and then the movie basically keeps hitting that same note for two hours.
Agnes: Patron Saint of Unrelenting Misery
Agnes (Anja Plaschg) is a young woman whose primary on-screen job is to suffer gloriously. She marries Wolf, moves into his house, and instantly discovers that the conjugal part of “conjugal life” will be him drunkenly masturbating, refusing eye contact, and passing out. Romance lives.
She wants a child, she wants affection, she wants… anything. What she gets is:
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A husband who treats her like a malfunctioning appliance.
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A mother-in-law who assesses her womb like spoiled livestock.
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A brother who gifts her a dead woman’s finger like it’s a fertility charm from Hell’s Etsy store.
She kisses the finger, tucks it under her mattress, prays, and absolutely nothing improves. The film is very clear on this: God is not answering her calls, but the devil’s voicemail is always open.
Plaschg is good—very good, actually. She inhabits Agnes’ depression with unnerving conviction. The problem is the film doesn’t so much explore her inner life as trap us inside it without oxygen. There’s a difference between depicting despair and forcing the audience to live in it like a rental with no exit clause.
Misery Porn with Period Detail
There’s a steady escalation of horrors, and they’re all technically “historically grounded,” but the way they’re stacked starts to feel less like world-building and more like a competition to see how many outdated psychiatric tortures you can fit into one runtime.
Agnes:
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Cuts her own tongue after a sermon about suicide being worse than murder.
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Sleeps by a decapitated corpse on a forest altar like it’s her emotional Airbnb.
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Gets dragged back “home” every time she tries to escape.
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Watches the animals get sick and killed as she mentally collapses.
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Is sent to a barber who threads horsehair through the back of her neck so the wound will fester and “leech poison from her head.”
Subtle metaphor for early modern mental health treatment? Sure. Also an excellent way to make the viewer feel like they are personally contracting tetanus through the screen.
Every time you think, “Okay, we’ve hit bottom, they’ve made the point,” the film cheerfully produces another creative indignity. You’re not empathizing by the end; you’re bracing.
Wolf: Human Red Flag Wearing a Wool Vest
Wolf, Agnes’ husband, isn’t quite a moustache-twirling villain—he’s too dim for that—but he is an exhausting, passive instrument of the system crushing her.
He:
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Ignores her attempts at intimacy unless he’s drunk and barely present.
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Believes every negative word his mother says about Agnes.
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Physically overpowers her when she tries to stay with her family.
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“Rescues” her from her suicide attempt, not because he understands her pain, but because he’s terrified of the spiritual/legal fallout.
He’s not evil, exactly. He’s just the kind of man whose combination of entitlement and cluelessness could fuel an entire DSM appendix. In another film, he’d be the secondary problem. Here, he’s just one more brick in the wall pressing Agnes toward her final “solution.”
Religion as Bureaucratic Horror
To the movie’s credit, the church is portrayed with a chilling bluntness. The priest’s sermon after Lenz’s suicide frames self-killing as worse than murder—no burial, no salvation, no mercy. By contrast, the baby-killing woman gets executed after confession and is thus, according to doctrine, “saved.”
The logic is monstrous, and the film knows it. You watch Agnes absorb this lesson like poison: if she wants out, she needs a sin big enough to get her killed, but with just enough time to confess it afterward. It’s theological loopholes as death machine.
That’s a sharp idea. It could have been an incisive, horrifying look at how doctrine can trap vulnerable people. Instead, the movie spends so long rubbing our faces in “THIS IS AWFUL” that the critique starts to feel flattened, like a thesis hammered into you with an iron homily.
The “Devil’s Bath” of Audience Patience
Agnes’ failed suicide attempt with rat poison should be a turning point. She is in agony, terrified of dying unshriven, and begs for a priest. Wolf lies, delays, then forces her to vomit, accidentally saving her body while destroying what little hope she has left.
It’s devastating. It’s also part of the point where the film tips from tragically immersive to numbly repetitive. The pattern is always:
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Agnes tries to find some way to live.
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Society, family, or religion blocks it.
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Agnes suffers more.
By the time she finds an unattended baby in the woods and tries to pass it off as a miracle—and is forced to give it back—you’re not experiencing new horror; you’re watching variations on a theme you got ten steps ago.
The film’s approach to mental illness and despair is unsparing, yes, but also relentlessly one-note. There’s no modulation, no small kindness, no moment of ironic warmth. Just an unbroken slope into the final crime.
That Final Crime and the Execution Parade
Agnes’ decision to lure a boy to a shrine, stab him, comfort him, then slit his throat so he’ll die “innocent” and she can confess, is the culmination of everything the movie’s been building. It’s chilling. It’s also the most interesting moment, because here the logic of her world finally, horribly crystallizes.
When she confesses, laughing and sobbing because she’s found a way to die and still be “saved,” you see how thoroughly this system has warped her. It’s tragically effective… and then the film still has to drag us through the execution.
She’s sewn into animal skin, hauled through town, beheaded, and her blood is sold like a mood-stabilizing smoothie. The villagers dip cups and bowls into the bucket, drinking her blood to ward off melancholy. The musicians strike up a jaunty tune. Wolf cries. A little girl joins Agnes in song right before the sword hits.
It’s pointed, grotesque, and so on-the-nose that the nose flies off into the crowd. Yes, we get it: this society consumes the suffering of women to treat its own sadness. Did we really need the literal blood stand?
Prestige-Horror Torture Chamber
At its core, The Devil’s Bath is well-acted, beautifully shot, and thematically bold. It is also, as a viewing experience, borderline punishing in a way that doesn’t always feel earned. There’s a difference between confronting ugliness and marinating the audience in it until they wrinkle.
If you’re in the mood for art-horror that quietly breaks your heart, you might be better off elsewhere. If you want to feel like you’ve been spiritually waterboarded by a very serious film that really wants you to know how awful early modern Christianity could be, step right into the tub.
Just don’t be surprised if, by the end, you feel less haunted than emotionally bludgeoned—and vaguely annoyed that all that pain, all that craft, and all that historical richness left you mostly with the desire to go outside and look at something, anything, that isn’t grey.
