94 min | PG-13 | October 28, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
A teenage girl moves to a new town and discovers three classmates have been waiting for a fourth witch to complete their coven. They induct her, bend reality, and start remaking the boys around them. The premise has teeth. The movie files them down.
Lily moves with her mother Helen into the home of Helen’s new boyfriend Adam and his three teenage sons. At school, three classmates recognize her as the fourth witch their coven needs. They induct her, and the four girls begin to bend the world around them. The 1996 original ran on female rage and the cost of power. This sequel runs on inclusion and empathy. It wants magic to heal instead of punish, and that choice drains the danger out of the premise.
Cailee Spaeny plays Lily with a guarded watchfulness that suggests more interior life than the script gives her. The three established witches share easy chemistry. Zoey Luna’s Lourdes, Gideon Adlon’s Frankie, and Lovie Simone’s Tabby feel like real friends, but the writing never separates them into distinct people. Nicholas Galitzine gets the most interesting arc as Timmy, a casual bully the coven spells into a gentler version of himself. David Duchovny plays Adam, the new stepfather, with a flat calm he refuses to oversell. He keeps the menace underneath, which makes Michelle Monaghan’s warm, briefly seen Helen land harder.
Zoe Lister-Jones writes and directs, and her instincts toward warmth and queer inclusion give the film a generosity the original lacked. The editing undercuts those instincts. Scenes end before they breathe, and the coven’s bonding gets compressed into hurried montage instead of earned intimacy. The magic itself lacks weight because the cuts race past each spell before it registers. The climax arrives abruptly and resolves with a cameo that gestures at a larger story the film never builds. Lister-Jones has a clear point of view and not enough room to stage it.
This is a sincere film with a clear conscience and no teeth. It updates the witch story for a generation that talks about consent and identity, and those concerns belong in the genre. The problem is that horror needs threat, and this version treats power as group therapy. The original understood that magic frightens the people who wield it. Lister-Jones knows what she wants to say and never builds the dread that would make anyone feel it.