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.

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