Critics reviews

Witches is Sankey's most personal work, bordering on a memoir, as she details her thoughts about not only harming herself but also her newborn, and recounts her hospitalisation in a psychiatric ward.

Without Sankey’s exact witnessing, without her saying the words, Witches could be dismissed as film essay inanity or cinema history novelty. Instead, it is a film that breathes, craves breathing, fights to breathe equally in collaboration with the image and its companions.

Witches is a deeply personal analysis of postpartum mental health illnesses in connection to the real-life history and onscreen portrayal of witches throughout pop culture.

Weaving personal experience and keen anthropological theory into a lush and haunting tapestry of magical portrayals from pop culture, Sankey achieves an intricate archival exposition backed with tremendous feeling.

As is her wont, she [Sankey] supplements all of it with a vast treasure trove of movie clips as evocative B-roll (the entirety of it edited with great skill by her), serving as commentary on the larger story. The result is a cinematic feast for the eyes, heart, and brain.

Witches is far from a purely cinephilic exercise in film appreciation. Rather, this film shines the most when Sankey uses the history of witches in cinema as a kind of paintbox with which to craft her own deeply moving story of being a woman who herself has at times failed to adhere to the socially acceptable model of what precisely that means.

As an artwork detailing the testimonies of ordinary women who have faced terrifying post-partum anxiety, depression and psychosis, Elizabeth Sankey’s 90-minute goth-lite documentary Witches succeeds in shedding light on a stigmatized and often silenced phenomenon many new mothers endure.