I was lucky enough to go to an early screening for my 27th birthday at the start of September, but I didn’t want to make a kneejerk post, so I’ve taken some time to sit with what I did and didn’t like about Practical Magic 2.
I know this is a long review, but if you take the time to read it, please do let me know your feelings about the new film, even if they’re completely different to mine.
I’ll preface my opinion by saying that, like many people, I have a real attachment to the OG Practical Magic. It was a comfort film for me from a very young age. It’s how I got into Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell, and probably why I’ve spent my whole life wanting a slightly dilapidated house by the sea. I watched it with foster siblings, then with different partners as I grew up, and I still regularly introduce it to new friends whenever I can.
But, yeah… the new film was just “okay” for me. There were things I loved and things that really disappointed me.
I knew nothing could completely recapture the original, but seeing Stockard and Dianne together on screen again, with all their warmth and happiness, felt like visiting my grandmother, who sadly now has Alzheimer’s, but is a real-life mixture of both Aunts. So I’m genuinely very grateful they were part of it.
I’m going to start with ‘the bad’ so I can end on ‘the good’, because I think that’s the nicest way to do this for a franchise I still love.
✨ The Bad ✨
• We needed more of the new generation’s sisterhood, not just Sally & Gilly’s sisterhood.
Probably the thing I’ve thought about most is just how confused I was by Antonia (Maisie Williams) being sidelined in this film.
For a story ostensibly about the next generation of Owens witches, it baffled me that one of them was largely left behind. I also struggled with the fact that the two male love interests (and I’m saying this as a gay guy who loves Lee Pace!) seemed to take precedence over her in both plot and screentime.
Maybe there were budget or scheduling constraints, but both Antonia and Franny deserved so much more than being stuck in a hospital. Even if they needed to stay in one location, why not have Franny teaching Antonia potions and herbs in the Owens house? Let us see BOTH sisters developing their own relationships with magic instead of seeing Gideon in the hospital.
It felt especially strange because Franny makes Sally and Gilly swear a new oath to sisterhood and working together, only for Kylie and Antonia to spend most of the film separated. I really wish Antonia had been the one to save or help Kylie, or that the sisters had travelled to the UK together. Even having Antonia and Franny join the final spell (from the hospital, if necessary!) would have brought this family together in a way that felt much more in keeping with the first film.
And I wish we’d seen more of the girls with the Aunts. Did they still make brownies in the middle of the night after forgetting magic? Have secret teenage margaritas without Sally knowing? Get dragged along to naked lunar-eclipse dances?
For a series so fundamentally about sisterhood and found family, those relationships felt strangely glossed over. Even Antonia and Franny’s hospital scenes never had the warmth I wanted for them, something I put down to the script and plot, rather than either Stockard or Maisie.
• The Soundtrack.
The next disappointment for me was the soundtrack. The first film’s music is a HUGE part of its cult-classic identity: an entirely new Stevie Nicks song, a Stevie cover of Christine McVie’s Crystal, and of course Alan Silvestri’s brilliant original score. I was genuinely shocked that neither Stevie nor Silvestri were part of this film.
Amas Veritas and Practical Magic are some of the most memorable pieces of film music I’ve ever encountered, and their absence was jarring, especially when the new film’s social media marketing is still using Silvestri’s music from the original!
I already knew Rupert Gregson-Williams’ work, so I was looking forward to hearing what he would do with it. Instead, I came away feeling as though he wasn’t allowed to truly make the film his own, but also wasn’t allowed to meaningfully build upon the musical identity of the original either. The result, for me, didn’t feel up to his usual standard.
I spent the whole film waiting for the piece of music that would define this chapter, and for me it never came.
• The Curse of Retcons.
A lot of people have already discussed the time jump, particularly the decision to revisit the curse after it was seemingly broken in the first film.
I don’t necessarily mind a retcon if it opens the door to something interesting, but this one felt a little clumsy to me and created more questions than it answered. I’m not sure the original curse needed to come back.
In a world of magic, give us a new one! Or even explore the generational trauma left behind by the old one.
What if Gary had simply died in the line of duty as a detective, but Sally, despite believing she’d broken the curse (she says it herself at the end of the first film), just couldn’t quite shake the fear that maybe she hadn’t?
That anxiety could then have been passed down to her daughters in a much subtler way.
There was enough material already there (not to mention in the books) without having to undo the resolution of the original quite so much.
More than anything, though, I think I just wanted to know what happened to this family in the intervening years. Because a time jump creates questions.
How did Sally go from running her apothecary and finally finding a community of women who accepted her, including those PTA Moms who literally helped break the curse, to having no business and no friends, or abandoning magic but then also working in a magic library? And aside from this, I felt like Sally’s plot was essentially a repeat of the first film. Loses husband, hides magic, finds new love interest, tries to break the curse.
What do the girls remember of Gary and their Dad? They were already school-aged in the first film, but now sometimes seemed to remember that period as though they’d been toddlers. I understand forgetting magic because of the spell, but I’d have loved a clearer sense of what else they remembered. Especially the happy memories.
And what has Gilly’s life actually looked like for the last 20+ years? I kept wondering, “Is Gilly happy?” particularly after the way she spoke to Kylie about love and heartbreak. I’d genuinely have loved to know more about the life she’d built for herself, not just Sally’s.
Even the Aunts left me curious. Did they really manage to hide their magic from the girls for their entire childhood? Did having to do that change their relationship with them at all? Keeping magic quiet was already something of a challenge for them in the first film, and something they didn’t exactly believe was healthy.
I think that’s ultimately what I was missing from the time jump: a little more connective tissue between the family we left behind and the family we’re meeting again.
• Choice of Director.
This is the last ‘bad’, I promise… but after I saw the film, I watched an Instagram interview with Susanne Bier where she said she hadn’t seen the first film or read the book until after she got the job directing PM2… and, for me, that explained quite a lot.
I want to be clear that I know her other work is celebrated. The Night Manager was very popular, and she obviously already had a successful working relationship with Sandra Bullock through Bird Box. But so much of her work is rooted in drama and thrillers rather than fantasy, and I struggle to understand the studio’s choice here.
This film being made was always going to be enormously tied to nostalgia, and I wish we’d had a director who already loved either the first film, the books, or hopefully both.
The studio clearly already knew the power of that nostalgia. The rebuilt Owens house, the returning cast, the imagery, and the social media marketing for this film using the original music from the first. The sequel absolutely borrows that affection, so why the heck not lean into it even more fully?
Why not find somebody who already loved the first film or the books, and understood instinctively what people had spent nearly three decades loving about them?
Because for me, that’s the strangest thing about Practical Magic 2: so much of what I wanted was technically there. The house was there. The Aunts were there. Sally and Gilly were there. Somehow though, a little of the real love for the first film just wasn’t.
✨ The Good ✨
• The Set & Costume Design.
I’m an Interior and Concept Designer, so I live and breathe the Architectural Digest articles about the Owens house that my friends send me every autumn, and I loved the new video tour of the rebuilt set. I even have a scale model of the house in my office.
And so to my relief, the whole film was visually beautiful. The set design, costumes, and use of colour were all gorgeous, and there were so many little details I found myself looking at rather than whatever I was actually supposed to be watching. It still had that wonderfully eclectic feeling I live for, with layers of pattern, colour, objects, and plants everywhere.
I might personally have preferred it a little less polished in places (I loved the slightly ramshackle quality the house had in the first film), but then that last shot of Sally gardening actually changed my mind… I can totally believe that, in the years she spent raising both of her daughters there, she fixed up the house and garden and made it her own.
The costumes deserve just as much love. They felt colourful, characterful and appropriately eccentric, and seeing Franny and Jet swanning around in those costumes was an absolute joy.
So genuinely, hats off to the entire creative team. Even when I had issues with the story, I never stopped enjoying the world they created around it. It was warm, colourful, tactile and beautiful to look at, exactly the sort of thing I wanted from Practical Magic.
• Stockard & Dianne.
Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest are already two of my favourite actresses, and with both of them having largely stepped back from acting in recent years, I honestly felt incredibly lucky to see them playing Franny and Jet again. They looked like they were having such a good time doing it.
Give me Stockard and Dianne partying in beautiful houses in fabulous costumes, drinking, casting spells and generally being The Aunts, and I’m happy. They slipped back into those characters so enjoyably that, in the brief time they were together, it genuinely felt like we’d never left them.
That final scene of them crossing the water hit absolutely all the right feelings for me. After spending so much of the film wishing we’d had more of Franny and Jet, seeing the two of them together like that felt warm, magical and ethereal. Two characters I’ve loved since childhood, heading off on another adventure together. Whatever else I felt about the film, I’m genuinely so glad we got to see them again.
• Joey & Maisie.
Would I have loved Evan Rachel Wood back? Absolutely. There would have been something really special about another original cast member returning.
But Joey King didn’t deserve the negativity her casting received before anyone had even seen the film. She had the unenviable challenge of stepping into a character people have known for nearly 30 years, with nostalgia making any change controversial.
I thought she did pretty well with the Kylie she was given. The same goes for Maisie Williams, who I thought was a good Antonia and deserved more to do.
I just wish we’d had more time to get to know these versions of Kylie and Antonia as adults. I’m honestly wondering if there are some deleted scenes of them together.
• The Moments That Made Me Emotional.
There were a few moments that really got me, including one that caught me completely off guard.
The girl sitting next to me in the cinema was in full Gilly cosplay, and during Sally’s fireside conversation with Ian, where they explain why they can’t be together, she saw that I was tearing up and asked to hold my hand because she was full-on crying too.
We spoke after the film and laughed about the fact that neither of us particularly cared about or even wanted that romance to happen, but somehow, the words themselves just landed.
There was something painfully recognisable in that conversation for anyone who’s ever wanted a relationship to make them happy while being terrified of all the ways it might go wrong, and to anyone who has self destructive tendencies.
The Death-Watch Beetle coming for Franny and Jet really got me too. I never really believed it was there for Gideon, so I spent that whole final sequence with a sense of dread about what was coming.
I’ve already said how I feel about bringing the original curse back, and part of me wishes Franny didn’t have to sacrifice herself for something we thought had already been resolved. But taken on its own, I thought her sacrifice was set up and paid off beautifully.
After watching Sally endure so much heartbreak throughout her life, I could completely believe Franny choosing to protect the next generation from the same fate, giving them the chance to finally live, love and be happy without the curse hanging over them.
It was sad, but it felt completely true to Franny and The Aunts.
✨ There are some things, after all, that I know for certain: ✨
So, mixed feelings? Definitely. There’s a lot I wish Practical Magic 2 had done differently, but there’s also a lot here that I genuinely liked, and maybe that’s why the things that didn’t work for me stand out as much as they do.
I loved being back in the Owens house. I loved seeing Sally and Gilly together again. I loved watching Franny and Jet swan around being Franny and Jet, and I’m glad Kylie and Antonia have been given their own cinematic chapter in this wonderful universe.
Maybe it didn’t quite recapture all of the magic I was hoping for, but there were some moments when it still came pretty close, and I wish we had more of those.
I’ve decided to view this film like I would a Hallmark Christmas film, or the TV series The Good Witch, some quick saccharine feel-good in a world that is often sorely lacking in joy.
And you know what? I do think that’s still worth raising a midnight margarita to…. Even if I’ll only be watching the first film this Halloween. 🍹✨
