Please note: this article contains spoilers for the original Practical Magic and references to bereavement and domestic abuse.

 

Seven free film rentals a week!!!

That was, without question, one of the greatest employee benefits I have ever received.

One of my early jobs, while I was at university, was working in Blockbuster, which perhaps shows my age just a little. I genuinely loved it. I watched virtually every new release, which meant I could give customers an informed opinion. I also had a decent staff discount, into which a slightly alarming amount of my wages disappeared.

Movies had been a big part of my life long before that. My family watched them together; I stayed up far too late watching them in my bedroom; and I later spent many a cinema date with the boyfriend who became my husband. I am, quite simply, a huge movie buff.

Some films entertain us for a couple of hours and then quietly fade from memory. Others attach themselves to a particular time in our lives. We remember not only what happened on screen, but who we were when we first watched it.

For me, Practical Magic is one of those films.

Released in 1998, it arrived when I was a teenager and has remained one of my favourites ever since. Now, almost 28 years later, Sally and Gillian Owens are returning in Practical Magic 2, released in UK and Irish cinemas on 11 September 2026.

The excitement crosses generations. My mum is excited. My friends in their thirties and forties are excited. Those who watched it on video are talking about it alongside people who discovered it decades later through streaming.

There is some trepidation too, of course. How do you follow a film that has gathered so much meaning over so many years? Will it offer something new, or simply repeat the original formula and hope nostalgia does the rest?

But the anticipation is about more than another story about witches. We met these women when we were younger; now, as we have aged, they have aged too. Research suggests nostalgia can strengthen our sense of continuity, connection and meaning. We are not only revisiting Sally and Gillian. We are briefly reconnecting with who we were when we first knew them.

 

A film that refused to fit neatly into one box

For anyone who has somehow missed it, Practical Magic follows sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, played by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. They are descended from a long line of women believed to be witches and raised by their wonderfully unconventional aunts, Frances and Jet.

The Owens women possess magical abilities, but also live under a family curse that threatens the men they love. The film moves through romance, comedy, fantasy, bereavement, domestic abuse and something close to horror. Critics did not particularly love that mixture, but audiences kept returning, and it became a cult classic. Perhaps its refusal to be only one thing is part of its longevity. Much like life, it does not remain in one emotional genre.

It also brought together two actresses I adored. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman were beautiful, certainly, but also smart, funny and fierce. They played complex leads at a time when women were still so often confined to being the love interest, side character or damsel in distress.

Put those two women together as sisters, and the casting was, frankly, magic before anyone performed a single spell.

 

Sally and Gillian: the need to belong and the need to be free

One of the strongest Practical Magic themes is captured in the contrast between the Owens sisters.

Sally desperately wants to be normal. Mocked and excluded as a child, she longs to fit in and create a safe, ordinary life for herself and her daughters. She is nurturing and protective, but has also learned to hide an important part of herself.

Gillian takes a different route. Sensual, spontaneous, rebellious and wild, she refuses to conform to expectations of how a woman should behave or what she should do with her life.

I think many of us recognise both sisters within ourselves.

The need to belong is not weakness. Human beings are social creatures; historically, acceptance by the group was closely connected to survival. Even now, rejection can register as threat. Of course, part of us wants to read the room and avoid placing our belonging at risk.

Yet there is another part that longs to break free: to stop shaping ourselves around everyone else’s comfort and live more authentically.

This can be especially familiar to people who have spent years masking difference or appearing highly capable while privately feeling they never quite fit. We can become so skilled at being who others need us to be that we lose contact with what we want.

Sally and Gillian embody those competing drives: Please accept me and Please let me be free.

Neither sister offers the complete answer. Belonging bought by abandoning ourselves is not true belonging, but freedom without safe connection can become lonely. Perhaps wellbeing lies in bringing the two together: finding relationships in which we are connected because we are known, rather than accepted only while carefully edited.

The sisters also resist the false choices imposed upon women: nurturing or independent, sensual or respectable, soft or strong. Gillian’s freedom does not make her shallow, and Sally’s care does not make her weak. Both are loving, vulnerable and powerful, and both need something the other possesses.

 

When being different is treated as dangerous

From childhood, Sally and Gillian are mocked and ostracised because of their family. Their difference is treated as something shameful and contaminating.

When an aspect of us is repeatedly treated as unacceptable, we may hide it or work hard to appear “normal”. Sally is not simply turning away from magic; she is trying to protect herself and her daughters from the loneliness of being singled out.

Many people recognise that experience. It may come from being neurodivergent, having a different family, loving or communicating differently, or simply failing to follow a group’s unwritten rules.

Fear of what we do not understand can become ridicule, exclusion or cruelty. Yet the qualities for which the Owens women are rejected are also sources of intuition, connection and courage. The answer is not to become less different, but to stop accepting that different means less worthy.

 

What the witch represents

The word “witch” carries a long and painful history, particularly for women.

Those persecuted during historical witch trials were real people accused of witchcraft, not supernatural beings whose existence had been proven. Although men were accused too, most were women. Accusations could grow from religious fear, illness, poverty, personal conflict, social vulnerability and ideas about what women should be.

The witch has also come to symbolise a woman whose knowledge, sexuality, intuition or independence is perceived as threatening. We need not agree on whether intuition is psychological, spiritual, embodied or something else to recognise how often women’s experiences have been dismissed.

The Owens women inherit something the outside world calls shameful and dangerous. Their journey is not about ridding themselves of it, but refusing to let other people’s fear define them.

 

Love, loss and the things we cannot magically undo

For all the fun and midnight margaritas, Practical Magic contains some painfully raw portrayals of love and loss.

There is a beautiful moment when Faith Hill’s This Kiss bursts into the film as Sally realises she has fallen in love. It captures the giddiness of life slipping past our defences and giving us something we were trying not to want.

That joy makes what follows all the more devastating.

When Sally loses her husband, Michael, her desperation to bring him back reaches somewhere deeply human: this cannot be happening; I am not ready; surely there must be something I can do. Grieving minds often search for bargains because reality initially feels unbearable.

Even in a world of spells, Sally receives no magical escape from grief. Love does not protect us from loss; it is precisely because someone mattered that losing them hurts so profoundly.

 

The curse as an intergenerational pattern

Watching now as a psychologist, I am also struck by the Owens family curse.

This is not a definitive interpretation, but families really do pass things down: beliefs about love, danger, conflict and what must be done to survive. We can inherit patterns we did not create and live by rules nobody has said aloud.

Sally has learned that love leads to catastrophe, so avoidance feels protective. That is how patterns can persist: a strategy begins as an understandable response to pain, but later restricts people living in different circumstances.

Breaking a pattern does not require blame. It asks us to understand what it was trying to protect and decide whether it should still govern what happens next.

 

Sisterhood that shows up

At the heart of Practical Magic is the bond between Sally and Gillian.

It is not polished sisterhood. They frustrate one another and sometimes fail to understand each other. But beneath that sits a certainty: when one sister truly needs the other, she comes.

This matters when Gillian is trapped in an abusive relationship with Jimmy. Sally does not ask why she stayed, tell her she should have known better or demand proof that the danger is serious. She goes to her. There is power in being believed and not abandoned.

Their bond also retains humour. Even amid fear, grief and extraordinary mess, there is laughter and the glorious chaos of women dancing in the kitchen. Joy does not mean the difficult things were not difficult. Sometimes humour is how people remain connected and find enough air to keep moving.

 

The real practical magic: women standing together

The film’s sisterhood ultimately extends beyond blood.

Near the end, Sally asks the town’s women to stand with the Owens family. Some had whispered about the sisters or kept their distance, yet when Gillian needs help, a community forms around her.

No single woman rescues everyone through individual strength. Safety comes through connection and the willingness to take another woman’s suffering seriously. To me, that is the real magic of the film.

The Owens women do not belong because they become quieter, more conventional or less powerful. They belong because they are seen fully and because the community changes.

 

Why Practical Magic still resonates

There are dozens of meanings we could draw from Practical Magic. This is not the definitive psychological guide. It is what stands out to me now, viewed through the combined lenses of a psychologist, a woman and the teenage girl who first loved it.

Beneath all the potions, curses and supernatural chaos, it tells a deeply human story.

It is about longing to belong without amputating the parts of ourselves others find inconvenient. It is about grief that cannot be magicked away, patterns that can change, and imperfect love that still shows up.

Above all, it is about what becomes possible when women stop facing frightening things alone.

I still have the usual nerves about the sequel. Part of me wants it to feel exactly like the original; another knows that could never give us the same experience. We are no longer who we were in 1998. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are not returning as the same women either, and perhaps that is the point.

Practical Magic 2 does not need to recreate who we were when we first watched the original. Perhaps it can meet us as we are now.

And I, for one, cannot wait to spend some time with the Owens women again.

If the struggle between fitting in and being fully yourself resonates, you are not alone. As a Counselling and Coaching Psychologist, I often support adults, particularly those with ADHD or suspected ADHD, who appear capable on the outside but feel exhausted by expectations never designed with them in mind.