In June, Shudder released a movie that is impossible to shake if you watch it. The Austrian/German horror film The Devil's Bath, written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the team behind Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge), is not a supernatural nightmare about witchcraft or demonic possession, despite what the title might allude to. Instead, it's something much darker in its bleak realism. Starring musician turned actor Anja Plaschg, The Devil's Bath is a deep dive into the darkness of depression. It's a powerful movie, and one that's admittedly difficult to watch due to the intensity of its subject matter. When it's over, you want to breathe a sigh of relief, as you tell yourself "It was just a movie. It was just a movie." Unfortunately, it's not. Franz and Fiala actually based The Devil's Bath on a real life woman and hundreds more just like her.

'The Devil's Bath' Is a Story About the Desperation Behind Depression

Anja Plaschg had only acted in two other movies in her career before The Devil's Bath. The Austrian native instead made her name in music, and actually did the music for this film, but it's her raw talent that makes a film that follows her for nearly every scene work. It takes place in 18th Century Austria, and it doesn't begin with Agnes, but an unknown woman who picks up a baby in the woods. This woman carries the baby through the trees without any expression on her face and without trying to comfort this small human. When she reaches the edge of a waterfall, she stands there for a moment, before tossing the infant over the edge to its death. She then goes straight to a priest to confess, and the next we see of her, she has already been executed, with her head cut off and displayed in a cage with her body in the woods. Not even five minutes in and The Devil's Bath leaves you feeling unnerved.

It's then that we cut to Plaschg as a young, newly married woman named Agnes. She looks happy, as does her new groom, Wolf (David Scheid). This might be the happiest moment of her short life, but it's also the beginning of the end. Whatever hopes and dreams Agnes had about a romantic life are quickly dashed when Wolf moves her into a new house he didn't consult her on away from her family. Although a nice man, he shows zero sexual interest in Agnes, and her days with him become nothing but hard manual labor outside before she comes home to cook, only to do it all the next day. Agnes quickly falls into a deep depression that no one understands or can bring her out of. Desperate to die, but unable to commit suicide because she'll go to Hell for the ultimate unforgivable sin, Agnes resorts to killing a young boy and confessing her crime. She, too, is sentenced to death, but she can die at peace, because she's going to Heaven.

'The Devil's Bath' Is Based on the Sad Reality Women Experienced

It's a distressing plot, one hard to digest, and while it's well acted and well told, The Devil's Bath is a film you probably won't want to watch a second time. This becomes even more so when you learn that the plot is not from the imagination of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, but is built from a heartbreaking reality hundreds of women knew all too well.

In 2017, for an episode of This American Life podcast, host Ira Glass spoke to historian Kathy Stuart about the phenomenon of suicide by proxy that swept across Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. So many people, mainly women, were killing kids so that they could be executed, that the government began to notice. To stop it, they passed new laws, and in Nuremberg in 1702, execution was made more painful as a deterrent to suicide by proxy. The new rules failed, so in 1767, the government decided to stop executing child killers to hopefully stop the idea of suicide by proxy, but that didn't work either. Stuart added that, "Cases keep happening until the early decades of the 19th century. So it really seems like people didn't get the memo. It probably dissuaded some people, but people keep doing it."

So, why, if you thought that a loophole to get to Heaven was to kill someone and confess to it, would you choose a child as your victim? According to Stuart, it was seen as a disturbing win-win situation. Not only would the killer go to heaven, but the victim, being an innocent child, would go to Heaven as well. It was thought of as doing the child a favor. While impossible to understand, it becomes somewhat easier to fathom if you look at it from an individual case and not the statistics of a whole.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala Based Agnes on a Real Person

The Devil's Bath is based on the true story of an Austrian woman named Eva Lizlfellnerin. She was 25 in 1761 and had just married a man she'd only known for a few days, and moved to her husband's farm, which was sixteen miles away. While now, we could cover that ground in fifteen minutes, in the 1800s, you might as well have been in a different state. Eva likely felt like she was in a foreign land she didn't understand, and was dominated by a controlling mother-in-law who treated the workers in the fields horribly by underfeeding them. This act only made Eva feel worse.

Eva reached out for help to her husband and her family, but no one listened to her. This wasn't the age of mental health awareness and therapists. Instead, Eva was told to work and pray, as if this would cure her. Feeling hopeless, Eva decided to end her life, but suicide is the one unforgivable sin. At first, she reasoned that if she could kill herself slowly through poison, she could trick the priests and God himself, who would think she had died of natural causes. When that didn't work, it's then that she thought of the suicide by proxy loophole by killing a child, a practice she'd heard of about others who have done the same thing. The first child Eva tries to kill, a boy, runs away from her. To make it easier, in her next attempt, she kidnapped a baby and throws it into the river.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala spoke about this with Entertainment Weekly. Fiala said they were surprised to hear about this phenomenon that they knew nothing about and were touched by Eva's story. Fiala added:

“But the more we researched it, the more we also found connections to our days, so to speak. You would never only want to make a film about the past. We feel it always also needs to [say] something about our daily life now. And this woman the film is based on, she was a perfectionist, and she just couldn't fulfill everything that society asked of her. She always thought she was not good enough and she was the one to blame in a way. That's something that I think many people and many women in modern days still [feel].”

No matter if you lived in 18th century Austria, or in America in 2024 with all of our technology and conveniences, we're all still people, with the same hopes and dreams, the same fears, and the same sadness when life doesn't turn out the way we hoped. Depression was just as much of an issue hundreds of years ago as it is today. While our mental health capabilities could be much better, in our modern era we have therapists to talk to, medicines to take, and a mostly more supportive foundation. Although we can't relate to what Eva and hundreds of others did, we can relate to what led them there.

The Devil's Bath is currently available to stream on Shudder in the U.S.