The Craft: Legacy (2020)

The Craft: Legacy Movie Storyline. Three girls, Frankie, Tabby, and Lourdes, try to freeze time with magic, but fail to do so as they require a fourth member. Lily Schechner moves into the town with her therapist mother, Helen, to live with Helen’s new husband Adam Harrison and his three sons, Jacob, Isaiah, and Abe.

The girls befriend Lily after she has her period in class and is mocked by her other classmates, especially school bully Timmy Andrews. They are amazed when she telekinetically pushes Timmy into the lockers. When Lily responds to them using only her mind, the girls confirm her to be their fourth member and invite her to join their coven, to which she agrees. As a result, they succeed in freezing time.

To seek revenge on Timmy, the girls cast a spell on him. The next day, Timmy behaves sensitively, confirming the girls’ success. They continue to experiment with their powers, including levitation. When Adam discovers about the incident in school, he scolds Lily but Helen defends her. Lily overhears them arguing and goes outside where Abe talks to her about his father’s authoritarian beliefs.

Timmy hosts a party, inviting the coven, and apologizes to Lily, eventually becoming friends with the coven. When Timmy is at Lily’s home for a project with Jacob, he admits to the girls that he had sex with Isaiah, Jacob’s elder brother, and that he is bisexual. Later, Lily places a love spell on Timmy, using his sweatshirt, and the two kiss.

The next morning, during class, the coven is told by their teacher that Timmy allegedly committed suicide the night before. Lily opens up to her friends about her kiss and love spell. They sever ties with her and bind themselves from magic. Lily suspects Adam to be dangerous and asks her mother for them to move out, but she does not agree. In hopes to find anything against Adam, she searches his office only to find her own adoption papers while Helen admits to her that Lily is actually her patient’s child.

The Craft: Legacy (also known as Blumhouse’s The Craft: Legacy) is a 2020 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones. It serves as a soft reboot and direct sequel to 1996’s The Craft and stars Cailee Spaeny, Gideon Adlon, Lovie Simone and Zoey Luna as four teenage girls who pursue witchcraft and form a coven. It also stars Nicholas Galitzine, Michelle Monaghan and David Duchovny in supporting roles, while Fairuza Balk reprised her role as Nancy Downs from the first film for a cameo appearance.

The Craft: Legacy was released in the United States through video on demand on October 28, 2020, by Sony Pictures Releasing under its Columbia Pictures label, with a theatrical release in select international markets beginning on the same day. The film had grossed over $2.3 million worldwide and received mixed reviews from critics.

Film Review for The Craft: Legacy

There are many nods, visual and otherwise, to the original 1996 film “The Craft” in Zoe Lister-Jones’ remake “The Craft: Legacy.” Lister-Jones knows the terrain well and has a lot of affection for the original. She’s not alone! “The Craft”‘s fanbase is passionate. The film captured the vibe of the era, all that mid-’90s emo-riot-grrrl-anti-social angst (plus a great soundtrack).

“The Craft: Legacy” stays with the structure of the original but digs in deeper to the “love spell” plot, which plays a relatively minor role in the original. The “craft” part of things takes a backseat in “Legacy,” as various social and emotional-sexual issues are explored. This, ironically, is the most interesting part of the film. Because the “witchcraft” part is treated mostly as a fun thing to do at slumber parties, there are very few frightening sequences (as compared to the often-unnerving original). The result is a confused movie.

Lily (Cailee Spaeny) and her mother Helen (Michelle Monaghan) move across the country because mom’s fallen in love with a new guy named Adam (David Duchovny). Helen, quivering with new-love excitement, pleads with her serious daughter to give it a chance. Mom lacks boundaries. Mom can’t see the red flags in this Adam guy. Adam lives with his three teenage sons in a gigantic creepy house that looks like one of the sets for “Lion in Winter.”

Lily’s new room is the size of a small condo. There are stained glass windows and family crests and wooden staircases. Adam seems friendly, but one glance at the title of his best-selling book (The Hallowed Masculine) makes Lily nervous. Adam holds workshops for men in the cavernous living room where he says things like “We as men need to alchemize weakness into sovereign power.” (Duchovny gives a very funny performance. He plays it totally straight.) There are weird undercurrents all around.

Lily’s first day of school does not go well. She gets her period unexpectedly and a cruel yet gorgeous kid named Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine) mocks her for it. A trio of girls—Tabby (Lovie Simone), Lourdes (Zoey Luna) and Frankie (Gideon Adlon)—find her crying in the restroom, and help her out. They have been looking for a “fourth” to complete their coven, and they sense Lily’s witchy powers.

Before you know it, the foursome are wreaking havoc at their high school. They concoct a daring spell to make Timmy a nicer person. Suddenly mean bully Timmy is lecturing other kids about “consent” and using words like “cisgender” and “heteronormative.” He declares his love for Princess Nokia, especially “her politics.” The girls look on, awe-struck at their own success.

“The Craft: Legacy” gets sidetracked with the Timmy sub-plot, and the film morphs into a teenage soap opera and/or ABC Afterschool Special. Spellbound Timmy has a secret, which he reveals to the four girls, who have become his new best friends. Lily is attracted to “woke Timmy.” Things are complicated. Timmy is best friends with one of Adam’s glowering sons. How do Timmy’s old friends respond to the new him? How do his parents?

This whole section is engaging, funny, inventive, while also managing to be a sharp critique of the restrictions placed on boys (also reflected in how Adam parents his sons.) Timmy says at one point, “It’s hard for dudes. There’s no room to be.” Alongside Adam’s toxic talking-points about the “crisis of masculinity,” you could say this is what “Legacy” is really about.

One of the main problems is that, excluding Lily, the girls are not clearly delineated as characters. You have no clue where these girls live, who their parents are, their histories, backstories, even their likes or dislikes. The only time we get a glimpse is during a brief scene where they play a truth-telling game. “I wish I had more black friends,” says Tabby, an intriguing comment, but just … left there, unexplored. Lourdes is trans, but other than that, we don’t know anything about her. Home life? Struggles?

In the 1996 film, each girl was three-dimensional, with flaws and wants and desires, each of which drew her inexorably into the supernatural. The actors here are all charming and funny, but they don’t land as distinct individuals. What are they looking for when they cast spells? What is lacking in their lives? Are they running from something? Trying to fill a hole? Or is it just schoolgirl shenanigans?

It’s hard to tell. Except for one conversation about “using their power responsibly,” there’s no real grappling with what power means, how power corrupts all of us. Consider how Neve Campbell’s bullied character in the original turns into a mean-girl bully herself once she gets power into her hands. “The Craft: Legacy” is uninterested in that kind of complex examination.

The original film ended on a very disturbing note: an overhead shot of Fairuza Balk’s Nancy, strapped to a bed in a mental institution, writhing around in anguish at what she had unleashed. Her walk on the dark side was too dark; she couldn’t find her way back. This sense of danger—emotional, physical, spiritual—is missing in “Legacy,” as is a sense of what’s at stake.

The Craft: Legacy (2020)

Directed by: Zoe Lister-Jones
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, Gideon Adlon, Lovie Simone, Zoey Luna, Nicholas Galitzine, Michelle Monaghan, David Duchovny, Fairuza Balk, Hannah Gordon, Julian Grey, Donald MacLean
Screenplay by: Zoe Lister-Jones
Production Design by: Hillary Gurtler
Cinematography by: Hillary Spera
Film Editing by: Libby Cuenin
Costume Design by: Avery Plewes
Set Decoration by: Mary Kirkland, Elsbeth Mumm
Art Direction by: Andrea Kristof, Paul Moyle, Christopher Wilcox
Music by: Heather Christian
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and sexual content, language and brief drug material.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Releasing
Release Date: October 28, 2020

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