Nearly three decades after Practical Magic first cast its spell, Practical Magic 2 arrives as the kind of legacy sequel that understands the emotional architecture of its original: sisterhood, grief, desire, domestic ritual, inherited trauma, and the stubborn hope that love can survive even the oldest family curse. Directed by Susanne Bier and inspired by Alice Hoffman’s later Owens-family mythology, the film reunites Sandra Bullock as Sally Owens and Nicole Kidman as Gillian Owens, with Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing returning as the beloved aunts, while Joey King and Maisie Williams step in as Sally’s daughters, Kylie and Antonia.

I enjoyed the film, and much of that pleasure comes from how sincerely it leans into the emotional world that made the first movie endure. It is cozy without being weightless, melancholy without surrendering to gloom, and alert to the way women’s lives are shaped by stories told around kitchen tables, whispered warnings, bad omens, and the rituals of protection that families mistake for love.

The sequel returns to the Owens women after Sally and Gillian have supposedly escaped the fatal curse that has shadowed their family for generations: any man who falls in love with an Owens woman is doomed to die. That belief, once seemingly broken, is violently revived when Sally’s second husband, Gary, dies soon after their marriage. The loss pushes Sally into retreat. Rather than raise her daughters, Kylie and Antonia, inside the knowledge of their magical inheritance, she tries to protect them by sealing magic away from their lives altogether.

Years later, the Owens house once again becomes the center of family gravity. Aunt Jet, following an ominous raven sign, discovers the Book of Raven, a text that may contain the long-sought method for breaking Maria Owens’s curse. But the book is incomplete, its most important pages sealed away. Understanding that time is short, Jet leaves the book and a note for Aunt Frances, trusting her sister to carry the work forward.

When Kylie and Antonia return home for Jet’s birthday, what begins as a family reunion turns into another Owens reckoning. After Jet’s death, the wake brings grief, memory, and magic back into the open. Kylie introduces her boyfriend, Gideon, and after she tells him she loves him, he is struck by a car and falls into a coma. The incident forces Kylie to confront the rumors she and Antonia grew up hearing but were never taught to understand. Sally, pressed by Gillian, admits that she concealed their magical heritage in the hope of keeping them safe.

Kylie, furious and desperate, steals the Book of Raven and follows visions that lead her to England. Sally and Gillian pursue her, guided by Frances toward Ian Wright, a scholar of magic whose knowledge may help them unlock the sealed pages and confront the curse at its source. As the family’s search widens beyond Massachusetts, the film shifts from the intimate domestic magic of the Owens home to a more mythic story about lineage, sacrifice, and the consequences of denying young women the truth about their power.

The plot ultimately gathers the Owens women around a familiar but still potent question: can a curse be broken by spellcraft alone, or must it also be undone through honesty, inheritance, and choice? The answer is less about defeating magic than learning how to live with it openly. Kylie’s crisis becomes a mirror for Sally’s fear, Gillian’s restlessness, and the aunts’ generational wisdom. The sequel is at its strongest when it treats witchcraft not as spectacle but as family language: a way of mourning, remembering, protecting, and finally releasing.

As a piece of arts-and-culture storytelling, Practical Magic 2 is most interesting not simply as a fantasy sequel, but as a film about the persistence of women’s folklore. The Owens curse operates like a family myth, a warning, a social script, and a wound. It polices love, punishes desire, and teaches each generation to fear what the previous generation could not resolve. That makes the film’s central conflict feel richer than a supernatural mystery. It is also about how mothers edit history for their daughters, and how daughters eventually demand the unabridged version.

Bullock gives Sally a sorrowing, guarded tenderness, playing her less as a woman who abandoned magic than as someone who has confused secrecy with safety. The performance works because Sally’s contradictions feel lived-in: she is protective and controlling, loving and evasive, practical and terrified. The film gives her a clear emotional arc, and Bullock carries it with the ease of an actor returning to a character who has aged, lost, loved again, and learned the hard way that avoidance is not the same as healing.

Kidman’s Gillian remains one of the franchise’s great pleasures: glamorous, impulsive, wounded, and alive to danger in ways Sally is not. That is why it is frustrating that Practical Magic 2 does not give her more to do. Gillian often functions as a spark, a prod, or a reminder of the first film’s wilder feminine energy, but she deserved a fuller strand of the story. The sequel gestures toward her insight and history without letting her carry enough consequence. In a film about women inheriting and reclaiming power, Gillian should have had more space to demonstrate how her own relationship to magic, love, and survival has evolved.

The recasting of Sally’s daughters is another choice that feels more practical than dramatically necessary. Joey King and Maisie Williams bring clarity and presence to Kylie and Antonia, and the film clearly wants the daughters to embody a new generation’s confrontation with old family terms. Still, the story does not truly require them to be younger in order to work. The emotional premise would have remained intact if the daughters had been allowed to age naturally with the timeline. In fact, keeping the original daughters could have deepened the sequel’s meditation on inheritance, memory, and the long afterlife of childhood secrecy.

Visually and tonally, the film knows what audiences want from this world: moonlit kitchens, occult books, aunts dispensing wisdom with theatrical calm, women gathering in rooms where grief and comedy sit side by side. The danger of such a sequel is that nostalgia can become taxidermy, preserving beloved images without restoring their pulse. Practical Magic 2 mostly avoids that trap. Its best scenes understand that the original became a cult object not just because of witchcraft, but because it made domestic life feel enchanted and female kinship feel like a form of resistance.

Where the film falters is in balance. It sometimes overextends the mythology while underusing the characters who made that mythology matter. The move toward a broader curse-breaking adventure gives the sequel narrative momentum, but it also occasionally pulls focus from the charged intimacy of Sally and Gillian together. The film is most affecting when it remembers that the Owens women do not need a large canvas to be compelling. A kitchen, a spell, an argument, a death, a declaration of love: that is where this story’s power lives.

Practical Magic 2 is an affectionate, emotionally satisfying return, even when it leaves some of its richest possibilities underexplored. I enjoyed its atmosphere, its intergenerational stakes, and its willingness to treat magic as both inheritance and burden. But I also left wishing Gillian Owens had been given a stronger story of her own, and unconvinced that recasting the daughters was essential to the plot. The film works best as a cultural object of return: not flawless, not quite as strange or sensuous as its predecessor, but warm, watchable, and sincere in its belief that women’s stories—especially the ones families try to bury—always find their way back into the light.