This deeply personal, essayistic film by Elizabeth Sankey impressively manages to be very moving but never mawkish, raw but also surgically precise. It’s quite loose in scope, but is essentially about how witches and their histories overlap with postpartum depression on the one hand and psychosis on the other, all told through the filter of Sankey’s own experience. Looking straight into the camera, she explains how she was engulfed by anxiety and depression after the birth of her son in 2020 during the Covid pandemic; After several trips to the emergency room and moments of crisis, she ended up in a special psychiatric ward for mothers and children.
Sankey says she survived thanks to therapy and support from other patients, which she likens to the formation of covens in witchcraft history. The resulting film records not only her story, but those of friends and professionals, from people who started support groups to the actor Sophia di Martino (from TV’s Loki), and even a female doctor specializing in perinatal care who struggled to convince other doctors convinced that she was not delusional, and was truly a medical professional, when she began experiencing the same symptoms she had been treating in others for years.
The Kafkaesque echo chamber of paranoia and patriarchal oppression is deftly illustrated by the mosaic of images that Sankey edits together, small snippets from a variety of films about witches, new mothers, and women enduring mental health crises. There are excerpts from witch-themed films such as Häxan (1922), Witchfinder General (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Witch (2015); Sankey also weaves in pieces from Girl, Interrupted (1999), The Snake Pit (1948) and Jane Eyre (1943) that touch on the themes of mental health. All in all, this is a powerful example of a bricolage-style editing technique that relies heavily on exploiting the copyright laws surrounding fair use to create a prismatic, provocative film style that is very 21st century.