Carys Manjdadria-Jenkins Carys Manjdadria-Jenkins reviews Witches– Elizabeth Sankey’s essayistic film examination of mothers, witches, and the ways we mishandle both.
Women often come in threes. The high school trio. The daughter, mother, grandmother. The three witches. A coven lies behind each woman, tracing herself back to shadows of the past. Such shadows remain today, in the mothers that are villainised for postpartum depression, OCD, and psychosis. Both the witches of Salem and the women of maternity wards urge that they are human rather than beast.
Elizabeth Sankey and her talking heads handle the taboo deftly to share their experiences which were made so much worse by their pressure to be silenced. So many of her interviewees, herself included, were placed in mother-and-baby mental wards to return a loving connection that their illnesses had taken from them. Sankey’s unrelenting paranoia, intrusive thoughts of murdering her son, another mother’s destabilising intrusions of abuse, are related from the set of a dilapidated hospital room, where the safety of birth is eroded by the reality of postpartum illness.
One mother and author, Catherine Cho, was sectioned for psychosis. She saw the devil in her child’s eyes, hallucinated demons surrounding her, imagined herself as her own grandmother and her son’s child, convinced she was destined to hell, with her son dying to atone for her sins. Awaking on a psychiatric ward, urinated and clothes ripped away, she now finds the person she was after pregnancy in the covens of witches of the past. Records find that they had also seen the devil, they too had thought of killing their children, they hallucinated and became paranoid and, perhaps, confessed as witches as a grasp for an explanation of their mind’s trickery.
The imagery that pervades the title and its cinematic b-roll, that of witchcraft, mythology, and psychosis, is one that is too often demonised and used for entertainment value – shock horrors. Yet Sankey finds the humanity within these supposed demons, creating covens through breaking taboos, comforting and connecting through conversation. ‘Being good or bad isn’t a decision that a woman gets to make for herself’ – she reminds the so-called villains that they are, ultimately, good.
