From her riveting portrayal of a grieving wife and mother in HBO’s The Leftovers, to her role as a fiercely loyal sister in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, to her turn as a cunning socialite in HBO’s The Gilded Age — Carrie Coon has consistently showcased range and depth in her on-screen performances. She also earned her a Tony nomination for the 2012 revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. While her characters often display seriousness and gravitas, Coon’s off-screen presence is refreshingly playful — a contrast she brought to her role as Laurie, a divorced lawyer on a luxurious and messy vacation with two old friends in the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus.
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For her Treat, Coon expresses her enthusiasm for her favorite Oscar submission of 2024, The Devil’s Bath. This potential Austrian contender for Best Foreign Film explores the lives of 18th-century women as they grapple with the confines of rigid religious structures and gender roles. Coon finds the little known story of women taking desperate measures to escape their oppressive lives both provocative and deeply moving. She was also captivated by the unique creative dynamic of the aunt-and-nephew duo behind the film, marveling at how their shared passion for filmmaking culminated in such a compelling and female-centered story.
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
One of my favorite Oscar movies this year was called The Devil's Bath. It's about women, mothers in the 1700s. Their lives are so onerous and so punishing, but they are religious women and they're afraid of hell, so they won't kill themselves. And so they would find an innocent person, a baby or a child, and murder them so that the state would first forgive them and then execute them, thereby giving them what they desired, which was an exit from their terrible lives.
It's a German film. [Editor’s note: The Devil’s Bath is an Austrian film] It was one of the German language entries in the academy this year. It's directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala and they're an aunt and a nephew! I just thought that was so interesting, that these family members with this, not immediate family, both interested in film, decided to make films together … and they decided to take on this particular weighty and female-centric theme.
I really wanted to be in the room and hear those conversations, like how this aunt and her nephew are talking about the 1750s and the plight of women and the plight of mothers, and this paganism and sort of Christianity getting mapped onto paganism at that time, and how those rituals were being co opted by the church. And then this idea of heaven and hell develops, and it creates this existential crisis for these women who are in these horrible abusive marriages.
It was the most subversive female-led film about the patriarchy. This was the most feminist film of the year for me. There's some imagery from this film that I find really indelible that I keep returning to. Maybe because I'm a mother – my life is not so punishing, but I understand the impulse. But yes, I’m just telling everybody about it because I want people to see it.