Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale (2024) Season One Review
SANCTUARY: A WITCH’S TALE Season One centres Elaine Cassidy’s Sarah Fenn alongside other powerful female characters with Hazel Doupe (Smother, Into the Badlands) as Harper Fenn, Amy De Bhrún (Line of Duty, Vikings) as Abigail Whithall and Stephanie Levi-John (The Spanish Princess) as DCI Maggie Knight.
When local teen rugby star and town golden boy, Dan Whithall dies in a sudden and unexplained accident, the tight-knit community turns to Sarah (Cassidy) for answers. Though witches are welcome to live openly in Sanctuary, the weight of Dan’s death brings to light how deep old prejudices can run and just how quickly suspicions can turn deadly. In the wake of a police investigation and as rumours spiral, grief soon curdles into blame and Abigail (De Bhrún) – Dan’s devastated mother and once Sarah’s closest friend – begins to stoke the pyre on a modern-day witch hunt.
As suspicion grips the town, Sarah and her teenage daughter Harper (Doupe) find themselves in the middle of a mounting storm: a community unravelling; an investigation steeped in bias and a deadly force of paranoia determined to destroy them.
I was tickled pink when I was approached to review a TV series about witches that was set in England and couldn’t wait to watch it. It starts off well but quickly degenerates into a ‘hate fest’, where literally everyone turns on Sarah and her daughter Harper to the point that it becomes unbearable to watch without seething with anger throughout. As a parallel to how witches were treated back in the midsts of time, then it certainly hits the spot in conveying how reviled they were and how their local communities were all nice and smiley when they wanted something from them and then how quickly they turned when things go pear-shaped.
It becomes impossible to enjoy or be entertained by, as it amounts to nothing more than watching a mother and daughter be persecuted and vilified on their home turf and there is little in the way of respite. It is unrelenting and leaves you feeling far from gripped or entertained but riled up instead. The anticipated magic and spells take a back-seat to a bog-standard soap drama dressed up and sold off as something more enchanting. I watched every episode if only to see how many of the vile characters met a just reward (not enough of them do for my liking). Perhaps if the personal drama was not the series’ only card to play and had there been more to the story than an unrelenting build-up of hate towards Sarah and Harper then I might have warmed to it more than I did.