The Austrian thriller “The Devil’s Bath” is a patient, pitiless descent into madness, belief and the helplessness of a time and place where life was, as the philosopher put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”

Based on research of historical case studies of 18th century Austria, it’s about troubled women and the scanty support and comfort they’d receive from their families and their faith in a hardscrabble subsistence society from much more recent history than you’d think.

Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala take us to a place and time where lumbering, communal fishing and farming were practiced, where life was unspeakably hard and when society and sanity’s margin for error were at their thinnest.

A new bride is tested by what she can’t understand, what the Church can explain or comfort her out of and what faith will not forgive.

That’s the world Agnes (Anja Plashg) has married into. Burly, grinning Wolf (David Scheid) from a nearby village has taken her in, spent his savings and her dowry on a farm, and invited her into this life.

Their wedding day might be their last happy day. Agnes is struck by the beauty of nature, so much so that she’s given to wandering reveries, collecting insects and shells and such. It’s not a lifestyle that can indulge such idleness.

Her stern mother in law (Maria Hofstätter) seems supportive, but Agnes is slow to pitch in on the fishing, the livestock tending, the cooking and house-keeping, and slower to catch on.

“The Lord won’t like it if you don’t cook for your husband!”

Her wedding night is a disappointment and her fervent desire for babies seems thwarted. Does Wolf play for the other team?

She sees the decapitated, ritualistically dismembered corpse of a woman who tossed her baby over a waterfall, witnesses the tragedy of a suicide and hears the words of the Catholic priest, who lectures one and all on what “crimes” can be forgiven and absolved, and those that cannot.

With her family insisting she stick with the marriage and live in the village where she has no friends, what options does Agnes have in this harsh, myopic reality?

Writer-directors Franks and Fiala immerse us in these brutish lives, underscoring just how limited the reach of The Age of Reason really was. Their film evokes “Midsommar” and “The Witch” in its blunt depiction of superstition as tradition and “primitive” ways and thinking.

Earthly suffering was a given, with heaven as the main promise of relief. Agnes and everyone else must struggle to eat, stay warm, avoid accidental death or grievous injury and procreate.

Survival is nasty business, and animal slaughter and cruelty are hard-wired into this illiterate, isolated culture.

All Agnes can do is lean on her faith, fretting over where “the altar” will go in their new house, and the more primitive shrine she can piece together in the root cellar. Her immediate experience and that of those surrounding her is all she has to guide her life.

It’s not enough.

Plaschg registers confusion and pathos in her performance. She lets us see the “problems” and “quirks” in Agnes’ personality, and fear for how they might be her undoing. Hofstätter’s mother-in-law seems harsh but rational and not all that unreasonable, given their circumstances.

Fiala and Franz give us a couple of scenes of heartbreaking grimness and unblinking cruelty, and a dozen other reminders of how unforgiving this world was to those struggling through it. The rituals, from weddings to executions, have an awful callousness that rattles modern sensibilities.

The film’s pacing is a tad too deliberate for its own good, spacing its shocks out, giving away its message and the direction it is going in long before it takes us there. But “The Devil’s Bath” (” Des Teufels Bad,” in German with English subtitles) is a reminder that then and now, the horrors of the supernatural can’t hold a candle to the terrors of reality at its ugliest.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Anja Plaschg, David Scheid and Maria Hofstätter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:01