Witches: a potent exploration of post-partum psychosis

Once upon a time, a young woman fell in love with a man. They married, and the young woman gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. But within a month of his birth, she was imprisoned in a small room, far away from the world she had known before.

So goes the story of filmmaker and musician Elizabeth Sankey, whose vision of idyllic motherhood turned into a nightmare when she started to suffer from post-partum psychosis and was subsequently checked into a mental health facility. Despite reassurances to the contrary, this was no mere case of the baby blues. Sankey could “taste the evil in her mouth”; feel the colour and joy draining away from her life. She recounts her panic at the compulsive thoughts of suicide and of harming her child that played in her brain, “like a constant loop of terrifying scenes.”

Sankey brings these scenes to horrifying life by splicing together film clips from Häxan (1922) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) through Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Girl, Interrupted (1999) to Unsane (2018). Many of the extracts feature witches, with whom Sankey feels a dark affinity.

Sankey’s previous film, Romantic Comedy (2019), drew on clips to argue convincingly that the genre was instrumental in shaping society’s expectations of adult love. It’s less clear quite what the central thesis of Witches – which yokes mental illness to witchcraft – is. Sankey’s engagement with the horror genre is more impressionistic than her analysis of the romcom. The examples she draws on reflect, rather than shape, her experience, working best as visual illustrations of how it feels to lose one’s mind.

One can’t fault Sankey’s skill as an editor. The images flicker on to the screen as if from her subconscious as she tells her story, itself structured into five parts, or ‘spells’, incantations that take us deeper into her witchy realm. But the film is at its most potent when it turns away from fiction and towards the real-life experiences of the women she refers to as her “coven”. Contributors include the author Catherine Cho and the actress Sophia di Martino, as well as medical professionals, a medieval historian and the friends and fellow sufferers Sankey met during her time in hospital. Clad in black, these women give testimony against backdrops of knotted ivy, empty cribs, and iron-barred beds, beautifully crafted by art director May Davies to lend an eerie timelessness to their stories. One woman recounts running from a kitchen full of gleaming knives for fear of what she might do; another tearfully confesses being gripped by the fear that she might sexually abuse her daughter. The only male contributor is the widower of psychiatrist Daksha Emson, who in October 2000 killed herself and her three-month-old baby during a psychotic episode.

At the heart of it all is Elizabeth Sankey herself: candid, vulnerable, aghast at her own feelings and behaviour, desperately grateful for the support that she found among these women. She shudders at the thought of what might have happened had she not come across Mothering Love, the WhatsApp group for women undergoing post-partum psychosis, and had been forced instead to rely on the NHS. It’s striking that almost all the interviewees are well-educated and articulate women and sickening to think what happens to those less able to ask for help.

Still, from the maelstrom of madness and horror there emerges hope. Ultimately, Witches is a film that is as much about love as Sankey’s earlier film, if not more so. It is a tribute to her friends, her husband and her son – who, she says, saved her life. She wonders how she will tell him about what happened to them in the early days of her relationship. Perhaps it would be enough to show him her film, the closing moments of which offer both liberation and consolation. Certainly, it is a film I will show to my children, to my friends, to any would-be parents. It shows us that dreadful place where, but for the grace of God, so many of us might go, and tells us we are not alone there.

And as for those witches? Notably absent from the raft of filmic references are Marvel’s twinned anti-heroines  Wanda Maximoff and Agatha Harkness – the latter under scrutiny in Disney+’s recent Agatha All Along. Agatha is selfish and treacherous: she has murdered her coven and sapped the power of fellow witches. But her greatest crime, the act that puts her beyond the pale? Abandoning her son. Perhaps in yoking witches and motherhood together, Sankey is on to something after all.

► Witches is available to stream on MUBI UK from 22 November.