‘Witches’ Review: Redeeming the Wicked Witch

The arrival of “Witches,” a documentary streaming on Mubi, seems strategically timed. The director Elizabeth Sankey’s contribution is part essay film, part personal testimony, though like Jon M. Chu’s musical blockbuster “Wicked” she, too, starts in the land of Oz.

As a child, Sankey explains in a voice-over, she wanted to be Glinda the good witch. But her experiences dealing with mental illness made her see an unsettling correlation between the wicked witches of the world and the women who, like her, have had trouble performing traditional domestic roles.

The first part of Sankey’s documentary plays like a cultural history of the witch onscreen, weaving together clips from TV shows and movies across the decades to illustrate a somewhat stale point: that stigmas around women’s health have informed the characterization of witches. When Sankey shares her personal story — weaving in interviews with other women and experts who also have firsthand experience of postpartum psychosis — the details of her illness take on an eerie new light next to pop-cultural images of madwomen, like Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby” and Isabelle Adjani in “Possession.” Based on the real women’s accounts, the fictional renderings don’t seem outlandish — the satanic underpinnings of witchcraft, clearly a superstitious, and deeply misogynistic, justification.

“Witches” eventually explores other parallels — for instance, the demonization of midwives and natural healers with the advent of modern medicine — but the maternal madness framework dominates the bulk of the run time to diminishing effect. The clips also veer from the occult and take on a more generalized creepiness that feels bleary and arbitrary. If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.

Witches
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Mubi.