There are some movies you simply grow up with, and then there are movies that somehow become part of who you are.
For me, Practical Magic was one of those movies.
I was very much that millennial girl who grew up surrounded by witches. There were the Halliwell sisters in Charmed, the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus, the Spellmans in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the women of The Craft, the Cromwells in Halloweentown, and later the witches of shows like The Vampire Diaries, The Originals and Witches of East End. Magic, witchcraft, sisterhood and generations of powerful women were practically their own genre throughout my childhood and teenage years.
And among all of them were Sally and Gillian Owens.
There was something incredibly special about Practical Magic. It was romantic, strange, funny, dark, whimsical and deeply feminine, with family and sisterhood sitting right at the heart of all its magic.
So naturally, I walked into Practical Magic 2 with a lot of emotional baggage.
Sequels arriving decades after the original can be incredibly hit or miss, particularly when nostalgia is doing much of the heavy lifting. I wanted to see Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman together again. I wanted the Owens women. I wanted witchy autumnal goodness. But more than anything, I wanted there to be an actual reason to return to this world.
I genuinely did not expect to walk out thinking I might love Practical Magic 2 even more than the original.
But I did.
A Story That Actually Justifies Returning To The Owens Family
Set around 25 years after the events of the original film, Practical Magic 2 returns to the Owens family at a very different stage of their lives.
Without venturing into spoiler territory, the story expands upon the family’s magical history, the infamous Owens curse and what that legacy means for the generations who have inherited it.
What impressed me most was that this never felt like a sequel created simply because people remember the first movie.
There is an actual story worth telling here.
The mythology surrounding the Owens family is explored with far greater depth, giving more weight to ideas that were established in the original without over-explaining away their mystery. We learn more about where this family comes from and begin to understand the history behind their magic and the curse that has followed the Owens women for generations.
The curse, in particular, carries significantly more emotional weight this time around.
Yet despite expanding the mythology, the film never becomes bogged down in exposition. The pacing is remarkably strong. I never felt there was a point where the film dragged or where I was waiting for the story to get moving again. I was engaged from beginning to end because I genuinely wanted to know what would happen next.
For a film juggling decades of history, returning characters and a new generation of Owens women, that is no small achievement.
Better still, newcomers aren’t excluded.
Longtime fans will obviously have a deeper emotional connection to these characters, but there is enough context here for someone discovering the Owens family for the first time to understand who they are and why their history matters.
It works as a continuation, but remarkably, it also works as its own story.
Sisterhood Has Always Been The Real Practical Magic
As much as I loved the supernatural mythology, the beating heart of this movie is the Owens women themselves.
And that hit me harder than I expected.
Perhaps it is because so much of the witchy media I grew up loving was built around exactly this idea. Witchcraft was so often intertwined with mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers and ancestors, with their greatest strength coming from the women standing beside them.
Practical Magic 2 understands that beautifully.
This is a genuinely multi-generational story about family and what women pass down to one another. Not simply magic, but love, fears, traditions, mistakes, strength and the responsibility of carrying everything that came before you.
The return of the aunts, Franny and Jet, is particularly wonderful because they now occupy an even more meaningful position within that family.
There is something I have always loved about the older witch matriarch archetype. Maybe it comes from growing up with Grams in Charmed or Aggie in Halloweentown, but there is an immediate warmth in seeing women who carry generations of knowledge and history with them.
Franny and Jet embody that beautifully.
What I particularly loved, though, is that the movie gives us room to simply watch this family be a family.
There is teasing. There is affection. There are disagreements, knowing looks, protectiveness and the kind of shorthand that comes from knowing someone for practically your entire life.
Those smaller moments matter because they make the bigger supernatural stakes feel personal.
The Owens women aren’t powerful simply because they’re witches.
They’re powerful because they have each other.
Practical Magic 2 Finally Lets Its Witches Feel Powerful
One of my favourite things about Practical Magic 2 is that it feels considerably more magical.
The original introduced us to this extraordinary family through spells, rituals, herbs and incantations, but this film takes that foundation and allows the magic itself to feel more tangible.
There is raw power here.
Without revealing exactly what the Owens women are capable of, I loved seeing witchcraft represented as something instinctive and deeply connected to family, emotion, ancestry and the natural world around them.
Ravens, familiars, herbs, plants, a Book of Shadows, rituals and plenty of other wonderful pieces of witchy imagery fill the film, but none of it feels like someone simply Googled “witch aesthetic” and decorated the set accordingly.
It feels woven into who these women are.
There is an earthiness to the magic that I particularly loved. It feels old, inherited and connected to something much bigger than the individual person wielding it.
And yes, sometimes it is simply incredibly satisfying watching witches actually get to be powerful.
As someone who has spent years watching magical women on screen, seeing that power portrayed with this much beauty and force scratched an itch I didn’t even realise I still had.
Sandra Bullock And Nicole Kidman Are Better Together Than Ever
Of course, none of this works without Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.
Seeing them return as Sally and Gillian could easily have become one enormous exercise in nostalgia, but both actresses understand exactly who these women are all these years later.
Sandra Bullock gives Sally that same grounded emotional warmth, but there is a weight to her now that makes complete sense for someone who has spent so much of her life dealing with loss, responsibility and the consequences of the Owens curse.
Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, slips back into Gillian as though she never left.
Gilly is still unmistakably the freer, more impulsive little sister. She’s the one more likely to leap first, follow whatever her heart is telling her and worry about the consequences afterwards. That slightly wild, carefree energy is still there, and it remains the perfect counterbalance to Sally’s instinct to protect, worry and think everything through.
What I really loved is that neither woman feels frozen in 1998.
They have grown, but they are still Sally and Gilly. And together, Bullock and Kidman are an absolute joy.
Their chemistry feels even more natural this time around, particularly in the quieter moments where they simply get to act like sisters. The affection, irritation, humour and protectiveness between them feels completely effortless.
There is also some wonderful chemistry elsewhere within the cast, including with Lee Pace, whose presence brings an entirely different energy into the film.
And I am going to remain deliberately vague here because this is a spoiler-free review. But I will say this.
There is some serious spark.
One of my criticisms looking back at the romance in the original Practical Magic is that certain emotional developments happened so quickly that I occasionally found myself wondering exactly when these characters had fallen so deeply in love.
The romantic chemistry here feels considerably more organic. You can actually feel something developing between characters rather than simply being told that fate or magic has brought two people together.
Also, seeing Lee Pace on a cinema screen is one thing. Hearing that ridiculously deep voice through cinema surround sound is another experience altogether.
Ladies, you have been warned.
Modern Witchy Whimsy That Belongs On The Big Screen
Visually, Practical Magic 2 completely understands the assignment.
The original is inseparable from its late 1990s aesthetic. There is a softness and whimsy to that film that immediately places it within that era, and trying to recreate it exactly more than 25 years later could easily have felt artificial.
Instead, Practical Magic 2 finds its own version of that feeling.
It is lush, atmospheric and unmistakably witchy, but in a way that belongs to this era.
That is such an important distinction because so many decades-later sequels seem determined to reproduce exactly what audiences loved the first time around. This film understands that nostalgia works better when you capture a feeling rather than simply recreate an image.
There are familiar touches longtime fans will appreciate, but the movie never feels trapped by them.
It has the spooky, the supernatural, the humour, the romance, the joy and that wonderfully cosy sense of magic that makes you want to go home, light some candles and contemplate whether you might secretly have a witch somewhere in your family tree.
I also underestimated just how cinematic this movie would feel.
Before seeing it, part of me wondered whether this was the kind of film that would be equally enjoyable curled up at home on the couch.
I take that back completely. See it at the cinema.
The sound design adds enormously to the atmosphere. From the quieter environmental details to the moments where the supernatural takes over, there is something incredibly immersive about experiencing this world through a full cinema sound system.
For a movie built around atmosphere and magic, the big screen genuinely adds something.
Practical Magic 2 Review: Final Verdict
There are plenty of legacy sequels that successfully remind you why you loved the original without ever quite recapturing what made it special.
Practical Magic 2 isn’t one of them.
For me, it somehow found even more.
It’s funny, romantic, spooky, emotional and wonderfully whimsical, but underneath all of that is a genuinely compelling story about women, family and the things we inherit from those who came before us.
It honours Practical Magic without being afraid to expand upon it.
And perhaps most importantly for someone like me, it doesn’t simply rely on the fact that I already loved these characters to make me care about them again.
It gave me new reasons to.
As someone who grew up watching witches through almost every stage of my life, there was something unexpectedly emotional about returning to the Owens women all these years later.
The witches I grew up with have grown older. So have I.
And rather than simply asking me to remember how magical it all once felt, Practical Magic 2 reminded me that there can still be magic waiting for us in the next chapter.
I adored the original Practical Magic, but I walked out of this sequel realising something I genuinely hadn’t expected.
I loved this one even more.
Practical Magic 2 is proof that returning to a beloved story decades later doesn’t have to diminish the magic of what came before.
Sometimes, if you get the spell just right, the magic can become even stronger.
