What would a teen witch do in 2020? In the 1990s, she’d dye her hair, make a boy fall in love with her, get aesthetic revenge on a nasty bully by making her hair fall out. But that stuff—from the cult favorite 1996 film The Craft—is decidedly old school. Mores and values have changed in the quarter-century (good lord) since, which is probably why the new followup film, The Craft: Legacy (October 28, on-demand), exists. It’s time to update the superpowers narrative to make it a better reflection of the here and now.
Of course, we’ve also been steeped in superpower stories for well over a decade at this point, in the form of clinging bodysuits and intergalactic fights to save the universe. So a new film about humble high school witches has to be cognizant of the scale looming over it, while also making local magic—the adolescent allegory about sudden new awarenesses—still seem big in its own right. Writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones has chosen an interesting path toward realizing that goal, of taking the gunky-cool vibe of the original Craft and translating it to a time when we have seen and heard so many more things. It is a noble effort, if an ultimately doomed one.
On some fronts, Legacy is an over-correction. Lister-Jones, an Old Millennial like myself, has perhaps gotten too hung up on the seeming demand that media aimed at Gen Z (and younger) be assiduously diplomatic in its politics. Which isn’t to say that she’s made a mistake in talking about certain social issues. There is plenty of welcome discourse in the film, adding a richness to the world of its characters that a simple redo of the original Craft wouldn’t accomplish. But in that careful inclusivity, Lister-Jones has forgotten to let her kids have any fun, to take true risk, to transgress. Which is what The Craft is, well, supposed to be about.
Legacy is an awfully earnest film, in which the quartet at the center of the story practice magic to better the world around them rather than taking the selfish indulgence that most teenagers probably would. From the first scene, it is established that these girls are aware of the social injustices ever surrounding people in America today, both the strangling claw of history and the present-tense clench of Trumpism. That mindfulness is no doubt shared by many real-world kids. But I’d have to also imagine that those young folks are living more complex and sometimes contradictory emotional and intellectual lives than Lister-Jones allows the teenagers here. In Legacy, they are mostly only agents of righteous change—always recognizing their failures of praxis, editing and apologizing as they go. It’s a pretty big burden to put on the shoulders of people not even old enough to vote.
That may be Lister-Jones’s sorrowful point: that a younger generation with no tangible political power must still be the ones to wrestle the world into something more equitable, because all the adults are either clueless or evil. But in a thriller film about teenage witches, it feels kind of unfair.
For all its teen-girls-written-by-men faults, the original Craft actually got to know its main foursome on an individual level; each had a mission of revenge or repair that gave specific shape to their magical urges. In Legacy, we really only know Lily (Cailee Spaeny), the new girl in town who is this film’s version of the Robin Tunney character. The other three are simply slotted into briefly described boxes of identity. One, Tabby (Lovie Simone), is Black. Lourdes (Zoey Luna) is trans. And Frankie (Gideon Adlon) is insecure about her looks and has a hopeless crush on a popular boy at school. That’s pretty much all we learn about them, as they’re mostly relegated to the sidelines while Lily deals with a pair of intense situations involving men.
The first male entanglement is that Lily and her mother, Helen (Michelle Monaghan, appealing but underused), have relocated many miles to move in with Helen’s new beau, a forceful but ostensibly friendly guy played by David Duchovny. Intriguingly, he’s set up as a Jordan Peterson type, a haughty lecturer of men who seems ominously unconcerned with the needs of women. What a fascinating inclusion of a real-world phenomenon! And yet Lister-Jones doesn’t engage with it thoroughly enough. It’s yet another detail that signifies relevance but never evolves past mere gesture.
The other male in Lily’s life is Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine), a chauvinist pig at school whom the girls make their main project. This plotline is Legacy at its most probing and witty: the newly formed coven does not, like in the original, do a spell to make Timmy lovesick. Instead, they turn him—for lack of a less appropriated and abused term—woke. They have, in essence, made him into a model of a new kind of cis straight white man, one who is abashed of his privilege, stands up for the right causes, and actually fucking listens. This is a really clever tweak of the old love hex trope, and leads Legacy to its most salient observations about the frustrations shared by so many girls and women like Lily, Tabby, Lourdes, and Frankie. It’s poignant, really, this wish for a better man, realized only through dangerous magic.