Witch­es review – leaves you wowed, wound­ed and educated

A lot of the best art acts as a con­duit for artists to unself­con­scious­ly reveal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties about them­selves. And it’s not just a case of nar­cis­sis­tic over­shar­ing, or being allowed to flout social and eth­i­cal bound­aries with impuni­ty – it’s about accept­ing your own fragili­ty and employ­ing your cho­sen art form to ask per­ti­nent ques­tions about your­self, ones which may not have direct answers.

I will admit: I approached the new work by film­mak­er Eliz­a­beth Sankey with a smug sense of know­ing what I was going to get. With her pre­vi­ous films, 2019’s Roman­tic Com­e­dy and the 2022 TV doc Boobs, she set out her stall as a mak­er of wit­ty, per­spi­ca­cious essay col­lages which employed archival mate­r­i­al to present a the­sis tap­ping into ideas of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, nos­tal­gia and pop social his­to­ry. But my pre­con­cep­tions in this case were entire­ly false.

From the out­set, Witch­es appears to fol­low a sim­i­lar path to its fore­bears, bring­ing in snip­pets from all man­ner of visu­al media to reclaim hack­neyed and misog­y­nis­tic depic­tions of witch­es through the ages. These women have often been cast as trag­ic fig­ures, and their out­cast sta­tus is such that they can eas­i­ly become the locus of all society’s var­i­ous ills. Rit­u­al­is­ti­cal­ly burn­ing them at the stake would seem like the only log­i­cal course of action.

Fol­low­ing a pro­logue in which Sankey pro­vides a voiceover atop var­i­ous melod­i­cal­ly-edit­ed clips, she then emerges from the safe­ty of the record­ing booth to take her place in front of cam­era and then pro­ceeds to relay a trau­mat­ic episode in her life which, ini­tial­ly, seems to take the theme and tone of the film to a very dif­fer­ent place. 

As Sankey’s har­row­ing anec­dote unfolds – and in her poet­ic recall of detail, it’s an anec­dote that you instant­ly feel she has spo­ken aloud many times and to many peo­ple – it is revealed that fol­low­ing the birth of her son, Bertie, she began to suf­fer extreme bouts of depres­sion and con­fu­sion. Fol­low­ing var­i­ous kind dis­missals from med­ical pro­fes­sion­als essen­tial­ly telling her to ​“calm down dear”, she was even­tu­al­ly diag­nosed with post­par­tum psy­chosis and placed into a secure unit with her newborn.

Though Sankey now has the gift of hind­sight and reflec­tion, she seems haunt­ed by the fact that if one link in the chain of events had snapped, then there’s a chance she might not be with us right now, such were the unchar­ac­ter­is­tic impuls­es she was expe­ri­enc­ing at the time. The archive clips are still there, but slink into the back­drop for a bit as var­i­ous fel­low trav­ellers are invit­ed to tell their own sto­ries, paint­ing a vivid and hope­ful pic­ture of the care avail­able to women who find them­selves in this sor­ry situation.

So the film mutates a lit­tle bit from play­ful essay to nec­es­sary advo­ca­cy doc, yet in its final pas­sages Sankey also man­ages to inge­nious­ly thread the nee­dle between her two sub­jects. She does so by expand­ing her purview to draw in fem­i­nist thinkers and his­to­ri­ans to make the point that the tenets of witch­craft in ancient times had much in com­mon with the behav­iour­al tropes of post­par­tum psy­chosis, sug­gest­ing that that this isn’t just some new-fan­gled ​“prob­lem” that’s been invent­ed by mod­ern women as some kind of dere­lic­tion of mater­nal duties, but some­thing that has been at best mis­un­der­stood and at worst entire­ly ignored. 

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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