Witches

It’s about women who are looked down upon, exiled, or considered Other, especially those deemed bad mothers. Elizabeth Sankey, who directed, narrates, and appears in the essay-like documentary, considers herself one such woman. “As a little girl, like so many little girls, I wanted to be a witch,” she says in the film's first few minutes, describing how she brewed potions, chanted her desires aloud, and dreamt of witches at night. What she didn’t dream of was postpartum psychosis, a serious condition that landed her in a psychiatric ward less than a month after giving birth to her first child — an episode initially dismissed by her doctor as “baby blues.”

‍

Arriving on Mubi the same day Wicked is loosed upon thousands of theaters, Witches plays on the same source material by paraphrasing one of its most famous questions: “Would you rather be a good witch or a bad witch?” Sankey’s blunt answer: “Being good or bad isn’t a choice a woman gets to make for herself.”

Witches is a potent brew, and as much an act of curation as one of creation. Most of it consists of Sankey’s narration set to footage from dozens of different movies, the two elements in conversation with one another as cinematic enchantresses from I Married a Witch, The Craft, and The Witch appear onscreen. While describing her intake at the psych ward, a process that included someone rummaging through her belongings, Sankey cuts to a moment from Unsane in which Claire Foy’s character undergoes the same indignity. She repeatedly likens her experiences to living in a horror film, waking up with an overwhelming feeling of dread every morning while being afraid to express her true feelings to anyone, including and especially her doctor, for fear of what they might think of and do to her.

‍

Not all of these scenes are from horror movies, though all of them are thematically appropriate. A shot of Isabelle Adjani in Possession will bleed into one of Mia Farrow’s more harrowing sequences from Rosemary’s Baby, only to switch to Kirstie Alley in Look Who’s Talking at a more lighthearted interval. The editing, also by Sankey, is endlessly inventive and makes Witches into a highly entertaining supercut despite its heavy subject matter. Even the way she divides the film into chapters is clever: Here they’re referred to as spells with provocative names like Speak Your Evil and Invoke the Spirits.

If you spend enough time escaping reality by retreating to movies, you might need those same movies to help you make sense of the real world.

The pairing of voiceover and footage is a surprisingly effective pedagogical technique. “Psychosis is a complete separation from reality,” a doctor will explain while we see Patricia Arquette navigate a dream in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Witches is very much a movie about movies: how they inform our understanding of our own experiences and how we compare those experiences to what we’ve seen onscreen. If you spend enough time escaping reality by retreating to movies, you might need those same movies to help you make sense of the real world once you return to it.

‍

Sankey was eventually helped by women she barely knew from a support group, raising a troubling question: Why did it fall to strangers to recognize her situation and get her the assistance she needed? To accuse a woman of being a witch, to make them an outcast, to exile them from the in-group of which they are a part and ensure that they’re never considered an equal again — even in the unlikely event that they aren’t found guilty. Sankey, who survived her own trial, has fashioned a moving tribute to the countless women who did not.