Franz, Veronika (1965- )

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    ‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: Madwoman in the Cottage

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    This stark psychological horror movie tracks the mental deterioration of an 18th-century peasant woman.“The Devil’s Bath” looks and sounds like your average horror movie — there are perturbing scenes of bodily mutilation, menacingly quiet long shots of stark Austrian woodlands and a young woman, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), who spirals into madness.Yet the cleverness of this psychodrama, by the Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (“The Lodge”), is that it employs the tropes and tools of folk horror without any of that genre’s supernatural flourishes. The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.The prologue sets the tone. “As my troubles left me weary of this life, it came to me to commit a murder,” reads the opening title card. We see a nameless woman toss a baby off a waterfall and then turn herself into the authorities, going through these motions with a deadeye roboticism. We’re in the boonies of 18th-century Austria, a land of tall, lonely forests and craggy hillsides. Families live in stone cottages and customs are dictated by severe Roman Catholic doctrines inflected by pagan superstitiousness. In this eerie, rather primitive context, its easy to surmise that the murderess is a witch.When we finally meet Agnes, a devout Catholic, she is initially excited about her marriage to Wolf (David Scheid), a stout, jovial young man who moves his new family into a remote cottage. Things sour quickly: Wolf proves uninterested in physical intimacy with his eager wife (and probably any woman), and Wolf’s cruel, domineering mother (Maria Hofstätter) blames Agnes for their lack of children.Shifting between naturalistic camerawork and static shots of uncanny landscapes and sunless skies, the film zooms in on Agnes’s deteriorating psychological state with minimal dialogue. A mood of desperation sinks in as the film showcases the punishing routines of rural peasant life, best exemplified by fishing scenes in which the slender Agnes struggles to keep up with the other workers. At one point, she’s stuck in a stretch of viscous black muck at the edge of the lake, a palpably distressing image that draws mockery from her mother-in-law, the fishing crew’s organizer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Reconsidering the Power of Doubt

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      At a festival that is having an identity crisis, some of the best movies suggest that lacking certainty isn’t always a bad thing.Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubt is fussy and forgetful, whereas certainty strides around, all action and achievement. As a film critic, swift, declarative certainty is a quality I’ve learned to aspire to. And at times, to fake.But this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, has been buffeted outside and in by political turbulence and organizational shake-ups. And so perhaps because the event itself is experiencing such uncertain times, the films made me reconsider — actually, doubt — my dismissive stance on doubt.Doubt is etched on Cillian Murphy’s hollow, striking features in Tim Mielants’s grave and moving “Small Things Like These,” which opened the festival last week. Based on a novella by Claire Keegan — whose “The Quiet Girl” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature in 2022 — the film is set in 1985 in the town of New Ross, Ireland, which is home to one of the Magdalene laundries, the infamously abusive church-run institutions to which pregnant, unwed women and girls were sent in shame to have their babies, who were then taken from them. In this case, the chief perpetrator of the abuse is Sister Mary (a frostbitten Emily Watson), who has clearly never had a doubt in her life. But the movie is really about Murphy’s quietly anguished coal deliveryman, Bill, and his deepening crisis of conscience.It takes considerable bravery for Bill to go against the unspoken rules of a community conspiring in silence. But as a man and a family patriarch, it is an avenue available to him. In Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s sweet and funny “My Favourite Cake,” the options are different for the Tehran-based widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), even if her spirit, too, is chafing against an oppressive religious social order. Her instantaneous love connection with a similarly lonely taxi driver challenges Iranian conventions in this glowingly performed rom-com that turns unnecessarily dark late on, when Mahin is punished for the act of gentle rebellion that the movie otherwise celebrates.Lily Farhadpour, left, in “My Favorite Cake,” directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha.Hamid JanipourFor a more satisfying, if low-key, depiction of lonely social outcasts finding a spark of solace in each other, there is the Japanese director Sho Miyake’s lovely “All The Long Nights.” Mone Kamishiraishi plays Misa, whose debilitating, personality-altering PMS makes adhering to Japan’s rigid codes of politeness mortifyingly difficult. But the friendship she strikes up with a co-worker who is plagued with panic attacks becomes a source of mutual support: It will likely be one of the most touching platonic relationships of the moviegoing year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More