Agnes will do her best, but her airy spirits soon are sinking.
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Agnes makes a morbid pilgrimage there.
The sinners body has already been stripped for relics, the toes and fingers cut off.
‘The Devil’s Bath’Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion/Heimatfilm
Agnes has one under her mattress.
It is a charm, supposed to ensure she has plenty of children.
But Wolf wont touch her at night, resisting her timid overtures.
The most he can manage is to masturbate while she turns her back to him.
How is she to have the babies she is put on Earth to deliver?
Increasingly, Agnes hears a phantom babys cries.
Soon she wont get out of bed or wash herself; her depression falls over her like a shroud.
No more needs to be said.
For suffering Agnes, however, there must will be a much more terrible rupture.
Fixed in her mind is the local priests warning against suicide.
A suicide dies without making confession.
She will spend eternity in hell.
Suicide, says the priest, is worse than murder…
The Devils Bathis never less than unsettling.
Sometimes it is devastating, as the directors amplify its uneasy mood with an episode of violence or despair.
A Nazarene backdrop of fog surging around ruined castles and vertiginous cliffs give scale to the drama.
This desolate place and time simply shows them in stark relief.
As the story unfolds, its inherent violence is let loose with full, visceral force.
It is not easy viewing, obviously.
On the contrary: everything Agnes does is, intentionally or not, a form of resistance.
