I saw DES TEUFELS BAD/ EL BAŃO DEL DIABLO/ THE DEVIL’S BATH (Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala) at the beautiful Albeniz Cinema in Malaga and hated every moment whilst viewing it. But it’s one of those films that’s stayed with me and that gets better and better the more one thinks about it. The film starts with a mother throwing a baby down a waterfall. It then follows a young woman (Anja Plaschg) into a new marriage; the husband is inattentive and possibly homosexual, the mother-in-law tyrannical, the work relentless, the loneliness unbearable. She runs away and back to her own family but custom and law prevents them from sheltering her as they’d like. She’s very religious and fears the eternal damnation that will follow from suicide. Her solution is to kill a young child, innocent and therefore guaranteed heaven, so that she in turn might be condemned to death and escape the torments of this life. Ostensibly, there were over 400 cases of this in Austria in the late 18^th/early 19^th century.  So, a film that is gruelling to watch ends up a bold feminist statement. The film is based on Kathy Stuart’s SUICIDE BY PROXY IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY: CRIME, SIN AND SALVATION.