Witches (2024)

A first-person narration tells us about how she wished she was witchy when she watched witch movies. It is an autobiographical audio book about the director's descent into pregnancy-triggered madness, set to a horror movie clip show interspersed with the director talking into the camera.

Her tale of postpartum woes escalates, and she introduces some doctors and other moms to talk about their motherhood horrors. Most of them ended up in or met in a psychiatric ward for mothers who failed to comfortably mesh with their babies. Not merely depression, but "postpartum psychosis" complete with disassociation and hallucinations.

The film has cool enough visual style for an interview-based documentary, and horror clips certainly help. The interview sets are in milk-painted cottagecore rooms strewn with scraggly, woody vines on the walls and hay on the floor.

It is more empathetic than investigative, so its impact on people who aren't personally affected by the psychological terrors of producing offspring might be limited. But if you've ever considered shaking a baby, maybe give it a watch.

It eventually comes back around to the Witches namesake when they read off a bunch of confessions from 15th century witch trials with explanations paralleling the interviewees' own postpartum psychoses. They all agree that they would have been burned at the stake had they been born a few hundred years earlier, voluntarily even. It questions whether the 15th century witch hunters were driven by a patriarchal desire to cast out the female healers and midwives and replace them with male doctors.

Double-feature with Children of the Corn for full effect.