The Austrian writers and directors behind pitch-black horror hits “Goodnight Mommy” and “The Lodge” are bringing their newest vision to America.
“The Devil’s Bath,” the latest film from Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, is set to have its North American premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and then head to Shudder for a June 28 streaming debut. The film had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale, and was recently nominated for 11 Austrian Film Awards, including Best Film.
The official logline reads, “In 1750 Austria, a deeply religious woman named Agnes has just married her beloved, but her mind and heart soon grow heavy as her life becomes a long list of chores and expectations. Day after day, she is increasingly trapped in a murky and lonely path leading to evil thoughts, until the possibility of committing a shocking act of violence seems like the only way out of her inner prison.”
Franz and Fiala spoke to Variety about the genesis of the story, the challenges of creating an authentic period piece and why they love telling tales with such dark themes.
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What was your inspiration in researching and telling a story like this?
Fiala: It was a happy accident. We came across the podcast “This American Life,” and there was an episode about loopholes with historian Kathy Stuart. She was talking about a loophole in history, how it was a way of committing suicide that religion wouldn’t forbid, and that’s by killing someone else. Before your execution, you could still repent your sins and go to heaven. So that’s what a lot of people did, and it was shocking to us that we had never heard about this phenomenon that was widely common all over Europe. So that was the first inspiration.
Franz: We contacted Kathy, who works at UC Davis, and she opened up her archive and sent us hundreds of cases she collected through two decades, and we read this one case that the film is based on. We were so touched, because it gives people a voice who usually don’t have one in history, like simple farmers and women. You normally only know about noble people and artists and kings. We could hear this woman talking about her daily life and fears, which you usually don’t know from people at that period in time.
Fiala: It was being transcribed like an interrogation, so it felt like she was talking to us directly. That moved us, haunted us and is still in our nightmares, because she describes these horrible things she does in great detail. That’s when we knew we wanted to do this film. But it wasn’t very easy to finance, and it was a hard script for us to write with main characters suffering from depression. Also it’s not a very active character. It’s everything you learned not to do in film school.
Your movies are so dark thematically. How are you able to go to these places in your work and come out the other side?
Fiala: Who says we’re OK? [laughs]
Franz: We are very curious people. We like to confront ourselves with truth.
Fiala: We want to see the world how it is, and that’s of course sometimes very difficult and painful, but I think we owe it to ourselves and other human beings to be honest about everything that’s not great in the world. Many movies just depict the world as a humongous place that’s amazing to live in. We think sometimes that’s not true and feel the responsibility to look into those pieces.
Franz: I think we do that to make it better in a way, because you can make the world a better place if you look at the dark places.
What anxieties did you have going into directing a period piece?
Fiala: Maybe too many to name in one interview. We like period pieces, but most of them have lots of stuff in them we don’t like. These recreations often take from historical paintings, which are mostly an idealized version of how life might have been. People back then had themselves painted in their best clothes, even if they were working in the fields. The work clothes in the paintings are much more beautiful than the ones they actually would have worn, because they wanted their lives to appear better than they are. We feel that most period pieces take those paintings and reproduce them, so they reproduce a history that has never been. For us, the greatest challenge was to find a way to depict history that, if it’s not 100% accurate, still feels true.
