Tribeca '24: Witches

In 2019, I dragged myself to my primary care physician to finally ask about chronic pain I had  been struggling with for years. It was embarrassing and scary, and when I finally entered the  room I was met not with my usual doctor, but one of her students in residence. Hardly a few minutes went by and he dismissed me. No examination. No referral. No medication. No  follow-up scheduled despite my earnestness. 

“It’s psychosomatic, honestly,” he said with a wave of his hand. I was trotted away by the  nurse, and out of humiliation did not see another physician until I gathered the courage in 2020.  These women sent me to physical therapists and specialists I would visit for the next two and a  half years. We were all masked due to the ongoing pandemic. They showed me the utmost  kindness and patience, and I will never know their faces. 

“This is one of the most severe cases I’ve seen,” one doctor mused. 

To be told your medical disorder is severe comes with a bit of emotional baggage to be sure,  but the part I hesitate to write is that it makes you deliriously happy. Finally, someone is telling me that I am not mad—and if I am crazy, it is because I am in so much physical pain.

The pain I experienced does not hold a candle to the anguish endured by the women in Elizabeth Sankey’s thoughtful and mesmerizing Witches. I walked in expecting a historical documentary, perhaps some History Channel-esque scenes featuring burning midwives and finger-pointing Christians. Sankey blew past expectations by weaving an intricate tale of female persecution and its relation to postpartum depression, soaked with the tears of her own harrowing experience in a psychiatric hospital after her own breakdown. The documentary works as an expose of her institutionalization intercut with iconic witches throughout film and television history and the confessions of other suffering mothers.

Sankey, like many women before her, struggled with postpartum depression (an illness she  dubs “madness” in her film) abruptly after the birth of her son in 2020. Her symptoms included  insomnia, psychosis, suicidal ideation, and in her darkest moments she dreamed of hurting her  beloved boy. After being encouraged by other mothers in a support group, Sankey checked into a mother and baby unit (a ward almost unheard of in the US that allows mentally ill mothers to  remain with their babies and bond).

Elizabeth Sankey deftly compares the experience she and other women, many of them doctors  themselves, had with postpartum psychosis to the factual accounts of women during the  European and American witch trials. Catherine Cho, author of Inferno: A Memoir of  Motherhood and Madness, details seeing devils in the eyes of her son and doctors. Women in  European witch trials confess the devil convinced them to kill their own babies. One mother, a  perinatal psychiatrist herself, was told she was delusional by nurses until her husband confirmed she truly was a psychiatrist. If this oppression and dismissal occurs in the  supposed age of 21st century fourth-wave feminism, the healers and midwives of the 1500s-1700s stood no chance. 

The women on trial knew their fate was the noose. But their mental anguish was too much to  bear, and death was preferable. “If that was the social norm, I would have confessed. I was  desperate for an explanation and would have been happy dying,” admits one of Sankey’s  fellow patients. 

The documentary leans heavily on clips from witch films, tales featuring psychiatric wards, and  folk horror which are at times helpful visual devices and, at other times, distractions from the main narrative. The Wizard of Oz, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Girl, Interrupted, The Witches of Eastwick, The Craft, Isabelle Adjani shrieking in Possession, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, and hundreds more iconic witches and persecuted women grace the stage of Sankey’s work, inviting her and the audience to join them in their revelry and pain. Overall, their inclusion does give the real mothers interviewed a positive juxtaposition, firmly placing them along the likes of Glinda and Cher, but these clips occasionally threaten to steal the show. 

Sankey also presents an ever-changing cottage set piece as her place of interview, which brightens as her story continues. The cottage is the most original part of the film visually, but feels very disparate and unnecessary for her overall story. Perhaps it is meant to evoke the witch of the woods who has graced the pages of so many fairy tales. Rejoicing in the playfulness of the witchcraft lens would be desirable but that is unfortunately how the piece loses a sense of cohesion. Sankey’s medical horrors, like my own and others like us, deserve more than clips of Fairuza Balk. Tying together the trauma of postpartum psychosis to the recorded symptoms of accused women choosing suicide by proxy should have been the centralized focus. More than one historian was needed to drive this point home, with screen time dedicated to them over actresses. 

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