'Practical Magic 2' Review: Sandra Bullock And Nicole Kidman Reignite The Magic, But The Spell Frays

LOS ANGELES, CA — In Susanne Bier’s “Practical Magic 2,” legacy becomes both inheritance and burden — a sequel tasked with revisiting a story that has grown into a generational cult favorite.

Returning to the Owens women nearly twenty-five years after their first appearance means stepping back into a world audiences have tended in the absence of sequels, a world shaped as much by memory as by myth. The film enters that space with reverence, intent, and the hope that revisiting the curse at the heart of the original might deepen rather than simply repeat the family’s story.

What emerges is a work overflowing with affection for its characters, a return to the Owens family sustained through decades of audience memory and affection ever since Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman) first cast their spell on moviegoers. Yet the sequel’s more fractured, shadowed tone diffuses the story’s emotional throughline, leaving it caught between the intimacy of family drama and the broader ambitions of mythmaking. The magic is still present, but it flickers more than it glows.

Set nearly three decades after the events of the original, “Practical Magic 2” finds Gillian single and free‑spirited, Sally a widow, and her daughters Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) now in their mid‑twenties. Determined to shield them from the family’s legacy, Sally has retreated from magic entirely, even erasing the young women’s memories of the inheritance she fears will destroy them. But her safeguard collapses when Kylie’s boyfriend Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) falls into a coma, setting off a quest that ultimately leads the family to the UK in search of a cure.

The daughters’ storyline offers a natural extension of the Owens mythology, but the narrative splinters across too many emotional vectors — Sally’s grief, Gillian’s restlessness, Kylie’s awakening, Antonia’s vigil, the curse’s resurgence. What once felt intimate now feels diffused, the urgency softened by a plot trying to braid too many threads at once. As the film expands its focus, it loses some of the emotional immediacy that once made the Owens world feel so personal.

If “Practical Magic 2” has a persuasive argument for its own existence, it begins with the two leads at its center. Bullock and Kidman slip back into their roles with an ease that carries much of the film’s emotional weight. Bullock plays Sally with a brittle bravado that rarely holds for long, grief surfacing in fleeting cracks before composure returns, while Kidman leans into Gillian’s restless charm, grounding the character’s impulsiveness in something more lived-in. King and Williams, meanwhile, bring fresh energy as Kylie and Antonia, though their arcs sometimes feel constrained by the film’s shifting tone.

The ensemble is compelling, but the performances often outpace the material, exposing a story that can’t always support the emotional depth its actors are ready to deliver.

Visually and tonally, the film oscillates between grounded intimacy and broader magical ambition. Where the original moved with whimsical spontaneity, Bier favors a more mournful, tactile sensibility, approaching the Owens mythology less as romantic fantasy than as inherited grief. That shift gives the sequel a distinct identity, even when the emotional and narrative demands of its expanded story begin to strain against it.

That sensibility extends to the film’s visual design, recreating the Victorian mansion with near‑ritualistic care as a gesture toward the original’s handmade charm. The rebuilt house, the familiar domestic magic, and the return of the aunts (Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing) offer the film’s most grounded moments of continuity. Bier achieves similar emotional footing in the scenes surrounding Gideon, whose fate becomes the hinge on which the story turns.

Yet that same sensibility begins to fray when the film broadens its focus across competing storylines. Its reach often outpaces its structural clarity, and the darker register, while intriguing, cannot fully compensate for a narrative that feels both overextended and underfocused.

There is earnestness in its performances, affection in its callbacks, and real pleasure in seeing Bullock and Kidman inhabit these roles again. Yet the daughters’ storyline, promising as it is, never fully integrates with the emotional journey of the original protagonists. Bier aims for a richer, more mature exploration of the Owens legacy, but the film’s competing generations often feel as though they are inhabiting separate stories rather than a shared inheritance.

In the end, “Practical Magic 2” returns to a world audiences have sustained through memory, affection, and cultural inheritance. Whether the sequel rekindles that spark or merely warms its edges depends on what viewers bring with them — nostalgia, curiosity, or the hope of seeing the Owens women once more. The film offers all of that, even if its spell never fully binds.