The Devil's Bath

Austrian, based on real eighteenth-century court records, and about a form of despair almost nobody has ever filmed.

Agnes marries into a remote farming community in Upper Austria in 1750 and finds herself unable to live the life. Suicide means damnation. There was, historically, a documented workaround: commit a capital crime, confess, receive absolution, and be executed in a state of grace.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala built it from the research of a historian who catalogued hundreds of these cases, most of them women.

It is not a horror film in any generic sense. It is slow, wet, cold and almost unbearably sad, and its horror is entirely that the theology worked exactly as designed.

Anja Plaschg plays Agnes and wrote the score. The opening two minutes tell you what kind of film it is.