Practical Magic 2
“The Owens might be cursed, but whiteness haunts the Practical Magic films just as fully.”
Title: Practical Magic 2 (2026)
Director: Susanne Bier 👩🏼🇩🇰
Writers: Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman 👨🏼🇺🇸, Georgia Pritchett 👩🏼🇬🇧🌈, and Kelly Marcel 👩🏼🇬🇧 based on the novel by Alice Hoffman 👩🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Jose Solís 👨🏽🇭🇳🌈
Technical: 3/5
More than two decades after Practical Magic (1998) became a cult hit, its sequel recalls the vibrant chemistry between its lead stars and #girlpower vibe. In the first film, we met the Owen sisters, Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman). They come from a lineage of witches who wrestle with a family curse: any man who falls in love with an Owens woman dies.
When Practical Magic 2 begins, the curse has just claimed the life of Sally’s second husband. Drowning in grief, she decides to renounce her magic forever and casts a spell that erases her daughters’ memories of being witches themselves in the hopes that this will spare them from the curse.
Narratively, though, this doesn’t make much sense. Even if Sally’s kids Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) don’t remember being witches, men who fall in love with them will still die. Regardless, this premise sets up the sequel. Years pass, then Kylie falls for a man named Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), and the whole cycle threatens to repeat itself.
If the filmmakers were confident enough to trust the original film’s magic—letting leading women Bullock, Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest shine—it would have been enough. Instead, Practical Magic 2 follows the tiresome formula that many recent sequels have used, especially if decades have passed in the interim. Studios try to attract new (read: younger) audiences by adding characters who can inherit the franchise and keep it going for as long as it makes money. (Remember when Paramount tried to turn Shia LaBeouf into the next Indiana Jones?) What they don’t understand, though, is that these nostalgic films are wanted by people who worship the original and want more of what made them unique in the first place.
The same trouble sank Freakier Friday last year. The original basked in the incredible scenes between Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, but Freakier Friday spent too much time introducing Lohan’s teenage daughter (Julia Butters) and a soon-to-be stepdaughter (Sophia Hammons), giving us minimal Lohan/Curtis charm. Practical Magic 2 does something similar: Every minute spent on Kylie and Antonia robs us of the joy that Bullock and Kidman conjure together.
It’s a shame, because director Susanne Bier (Bird Box) gives us a taste. Scenes with the Owen sisters and their aunties (Channing and Wiest) send delicious throwbacks to midnight margaritas and toxic men buried under rose gardens. No witchery is as potent as seeing these women sit and talk about life, loss, and love.
The film also gets the production design right, with Tom Burton rebuilding the Owens house on a soundstage down to the last detail. For lovers of the original, it feels like a homecoming. Practical Magic lost money in 1998 and spent nearly three decades becoming the kind of film people rewatch every autumn before Warner Bros. ever greenlit a follow-up. I only wish the sequel trusted its leading women enough to carry the film; they’re more than capable.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Practical Magic ended with the town’s women, who had spent years fearing and ostracizing the Owens sisters, forming a circle to save Gillian from possession. The sequel finds its own version of that solidarity, with women choosing one another over suspicion. Another character chooses when it’s time to die with dignity, all on her own terms.
Behind the lens, two of the three screenwriters are women: Georgia Pritchett, known for Succession (2018–23) and Veep (2012–19), and Kelly Marcel, who wrote Saving Mr. Banks (2013) and the Venom trilogy (2018–24). Bier directs with a loving female gaze, allowing her camera to stay curious about these women’s desires, fears, and hopes. Bullock’s Sally stays guarded, still carrying the weight of losing a second husband, but her protectiveness toward her daughters reads as love rather than control.
The film also keeps circling the idea that breaking a generational curse starts with actually knowing the generations that came before you. In this case, characters satisfyingly learn the history of the Owens family, how its women were persecuted for their powers, and how far they’ve come since.
Race: 1/5
The Owens might be cursed, but whiteness haunts the Practical Magic films just as fully. The central sisters, aunts, daughters, love interests, and town of witches, villains, and skeptics that make up this world are almost all white. If we want an excuse, we could claim that the small-town setting in southern England could plausibly make this homogeneity possible. But it’s either a stretch or negligent, or both.
The one exception is Maridueña, an American actor of Mexican, Cuban, and Ecuadorian descent, who plays Gideon. But the film never lets his race enter the story, rendering that representation shallow, and he also spends most of his time on screen in a coma.
Bonus for Age: +0.75
Wiest is 78 at the time of this review, Channing is 82, and their characters Aunt Jet and Aunt Frances, respectively, provide more than just sage advice to their nieces. They’re shown as women who have lived full lives, and they comment openly on Sally’s refusal to embrace the magic that makes her who she is. Both Jet and Frances’ storylines are resolved with real dignity.
Additionally, Bullock is 62, and Kidman is 59. Kidman in particular gets to bring back the horniness that made Gillian so charming. She is all desire and YOLO, while Sally’s motivation stays more tethered to her daughters and her grief. Neither woman gets sidelined or softened into background noise the way actresses their age usually do once a franchise brings in a younger generation.
Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.25/5
Occasionally, Practical Magic 2 shows flashes of understanding what works. Bullock and Kidman still find each other across a kitchen table, Wiest and Channing’s characters are given agency, and women of every age are allowed to want things out loud. But then it doubts itself and gives its attention to younger characters that nobody asked to meet. Not unlike Sally herself, Practical Magic 2 spends too much time refusing to trust its own inherited power.
Like Practical Magic 2? Try these other titles starring Nicole Kidman or Sandra Bullock.
Ocean’s 8 (2018)
Bombshell (2019)
Big Little Lies - Season 1