Director Elizabeth Sankey’s free-ranging film uses interviews with actors and support groups alongside clips of cinematic covens to draw parallels with her own experiences

This deeply personal, essayistic film by Elizabeth Sankey impressively manages to be very moving but never mawkish, raw but also surgically precise. It is quite free-ranging in its scope, but is essentially about how witches and their history overlaps with postpartum depression on the one hand and psychosis on the other, all told through the filter of Sankey’s own experience. Looking straight into the camera, she explains how she was engulfed by anxiety and depression after the birth of her son in 2020 during the Covid pandemic; after several trips to A&E and crisis moments, she ended up in a special psychiatric ward for mothers and children.

Sankey says she made it through thanks to therapy and support from other patients, which she likens to the formation of covens in witchcraft lore. The resulting film records not just her story but that of friends and professionals, from people who started support groups to the actor Sophia di Martino (from TV’s Loki), and even a female doctor specialising in perinatal care who struggled to persuade other doctors that she wasn’t delusional, and really was a medical professional, when she started experiencing the very symptoms she’d treated in others for years.