The VHS of Practical Magic was kept at the back of the cabinet, where the not-quite-child-appropriate films lived. The cover transfixed me: the ethereal faces of Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, surrounded by burning candles. At eight years old, I was instantly drawn to something I didn’t yet understand. One day, I’d be ready.
Despite opening at No 1 at the US box office, Practical Magic failed to recoup its budget and was dismissed as tonally confused. Variety called it “part comedy, part family drama, part romance, part special-effects mystery-adventure … a hodgepodge”.
Set in a fictional cosy New England town, it follows two sisters, Sally (Bullock) and Gillian (Kidman), who are raised by their non-conforming spinster aunts, and practising witches, Francis (Stockard Channing) and Jet (Dianne Wiest), after their mother dies of a broken heart. You see, the Owens women are cursed. Any man they truly love will die.
This premise should be camp. And it is, deliciously so. But it is also devastating.
At age 12 I finally watched the film and it felt like it was made for me. I recognised and appreciated, unlike its critics, the hodgepodge. It is not so much a “chick flick” with magic as a genre chimera: romance, gothic melodrama, small-town satire, ghost story and feminist parable.
I grew up in Hong Kong during the 1990s, a city defined by its complex history with traditions shaped by diverse communities and displaced refugees like my Beijing-born father. Practical Magic was released the year after the 1997 handover from Britain back to China, an intense period of cultural collision. Reruns of Ready Steady Cook played alongside imperial-set Chinese soap operas. In cinema, we experienced the rise in directors John Woo and Wong Kar-wai.
The small town treats the Owens family as contagious. Sally, a widowed mother of two, destined to be the more powerful of the sisters, attempts invisibility and denial. Her sister Gillian, meanwhile, incandescent and reckless, wears her self-imposed exile from the town like a dare. Neither strategy protects them. The curse is not merely supernatural. It is what happens to women who refuse to behave predictably.
When Gillian attempts to escape a violent relationship with her demonic lover Jimmy (Goran Višnjić), Sally drops everything to rescue her, only for the pair to be kidnapped by him, forcing them to poison his tequila with belladonna and killing him. The story flips again. Racked with fear for retribution, they resurrect him using dark magic, only to kill him once more in self-defence.
The film’s most famous scene is one of infectious energy. Shortly after burying Jimmy in the garden, unbeknown to their aunts, the four women dance around their kitchen to Harry Nilsson’s Coconut during a round of midnight margaritas. But what begins as release slips into something feral. Possessed by Jimmy’s spirit, they turn on one another, hurling misogyny with frightening ease.
When the aunts finally realise what Sally and Gillian have done, they leave with a simple instruction: clean up your own mess.
Then Practical Magic does what all satisfying films do. It allows its heroines to put aside their pride and ask for help. Jimmy’s spirit is banished into Gillian’s body and she becomes possessed. The same women who ostracised Sally arrive to help, Together, they banish him from Gillian and sweep the dusty remains away.
The romance is swoon-worthy. It crescendoes during a devastating exchange with detective Gary Hallet (a brooding Aidan Quinn), sent to investigate Jimmy’s disappearance. Sally pushes him away by confessing she sent for him, He simply replies: “I wished for you too.” Their unity is not framed as destiny, but recognition. A fantasy, perhaps, but an authentic one.
At the end of the film, the Owens host a Halloween bash and revel in their witchery with, not apart from, the townsfolk. Some might call this a cheesy resolution, but for me it crystallised what the film is truly about. Reconciliation across difference, in any world, is vital to our survival.
The 90s disdain for hybridity was generational. I am currently writing my own “chick flick” with the British Film Institute, and I continually return to this film as proof that hybrid genre films not only work in service of storytelling, but endure.
Practical Magic remains my ultimate comfort film because it insists adversity can be overcome. Family can be formed, loneliness is not a fixed state of being and can be remedied, preferably while drinking a cocktail barefoot in an exquisitely decorated kitchen, candles lit and doors open to the night.
