It’s gen X nostalgia in full swing. I’m with my sister, who’s dressed in a floral maxi dress and slim-knit cardigan, surrounded by satin baby-dolls and goth-light outfits worn by the tattooed gen Zees and witchTok millennials. Three generations all queuing for Practical Magic 2 in gleeful anticipation, after a gap of 27 years.
Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock reprising their roles as the Owens sisters: tick. Seasoned female director Susanne Bier behind the camera: tick. The brilliant Dianne Wiest and the legend that is Stockard Channing back in the saddle as the aunts, Jet and Franny: tick.
The only face missing is Evan Rachel Wood, absent from the line-up as Sally’s eldest daughter Kylie. When Joey King got the role, loyal fans were dismayed. The character’s age was cited by the director which, given that Wood (who is 39) played Kylie in the original film, makes no sense.
I hope the public fallout from Wood’s abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson didn’t factor into the decision not to rehire her. If Hollywood is policing survivors to avoid PR issues, it would put the film’s feminist ethos firmly at odds with the industry that created it.
I decided to wait and see whether I cared about Wood’s omission once I’d seen the film – and I did care. Not because King’s performance isn’t great, but because casting Wood as an older Kylie could have brought nuance and continuity to a flimsy story.
What made the original Practical Magic work was the fans’ love for it. An adaptation of the 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman, it was a slow burn: the reviews were lukewarm in 1998, and Bullock herself said it needed “to marinate”.
But new audiences fell in love with sisters Sally and Gillian Owens. They belong to a lineage of Massachusetts witches burdened by a curse whereby any man who falls in love with them dies early.
Darker undertones were present in the original film, though softened by an appropriate pinch of cartoonishness. After an abusive lover of Gillian’s is accidentally killed and resurrected as a malevolent spirit, the sisters must rely on their aunts and a newly formed coven of local women to exorcise the entity and break the family curse.
Over the years, Practical Magic became a beloved autumnal perennial. Though by no means a masterpiece, the film tapped into the zeitgeist – a yearning for the simplicity of a pagan matriarchal past, wrapped in a frothy, escapist package to enjoy whenever women wearied of living in a world designed for men.
Not hiring Wood exposes Hollywood’s ageism. The industry is eager to commercialise nostalgia, yet the result is a film that could never fully belong to fans or honour the sisterhood theme it trades on.
Wood has been through the mill and is now a seasoned actor. That human complexity is missing from the sequel; her presence could have implicitly supplied it.
Following up a cult favourite
The second film is set 25 years later. Sally Owens (Bullock) has hidden her family’s witchcraft from her grown daughters, Kylie (King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams). However, the fatal ancestral love curse strikes again when Kylie’s boyfriend Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) is critically injured.
Kylie flees to England to find a cure. To save the next generation, Sally, Gillian and the aunts, Jet (Wiest) and Franny (Channing), must also cross the Atlantic, team up with an academic warlock (Lee Pace), and confront dark forces.
Some of the film’s choices felt so odd that the audience were laughing at it, rather than with it. A red phone box features, so we know it’s England – or does the storyline need a defibrillator? The idyllic English village setting reminded me of Christmas schmaltzfest The Holiday, but PC2’s plotline makes that film seem Shakespearean.
Gideon’s cloying devotion is so overstated that Kylie’s reciprocated love for him lands like a joke. When a male character’s behaviour feels artificial, it casts a shadow over narratives built on female connection. Viewers long to lose ourselves in the story, but the storytellers must first clear the path.
Yes, it is a story about witches, but really it’s about the power of the feminine: readdressing ancient wrongs, recognising the nurturers who came before, believing in ourselves. Men come and go, relationships die, but the women in your life are forever.
A touch of emotional distance could have made Kylie’s relationship with Gideon her first love without him being her first long-term partner. This would have connected her to her Aunt Gillian, bolstering a storyline around her understandable attachment issues, and giving the frivolity something real to stand on.
Warner Bros Pictures, Author provided (no reuse)
And why does Sally always get the love-match? The professor-warlock is Sally’s third love-at-first-sight in two films. If Gillian’s romantic dysfunction had been fleshed out, perhaps the others – Kidman, Williams, Channing – would have secured some more airtime. Instead, Bullock’s gooey double-take routine with another unfortunate man feels like déjà vu.
If only sisterhood had been explored through the messiness of modern relationships. And if the film had made explicit that breaking the curse required honouring female legacy, it would have felt more grounded – and we might have all walked away feeling satisfied.
But I still think Practical Magic 2, like its predecessor, will endure. Lovers of the genre have a thirst for community and the old ways, and faithful fans will sustain it.
Practical Magic is in cinemas from September 11
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