Trama

A young boy and his grandmother have a run-in with a coven of witches and their leader.

Reimagining Roald Dahl's beloved story for a modern audience, Robert Zemeckis's visually innovative film tells the darkly humorous and heartwarming tale of a young orphaned boy who, in late 1967, goes to live with his loving Grandma in the rural Alabama town of Demopolis. As the boy and his grandmother encounter some deceptively glamorous but thoroughly diabolical witches, she wisely whisks him away to a seaside resort. Regrettably, they arrive at precisely the same time that the world's Grand High Witch has gathered her fellow cronies from around the globe-undercover-to carry out her nefarious plans. Zemeckis is joined by a world-class team of filmmakers, including Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris. The cast includes powerhouse performances from Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Kristin Chenoweth and Chris Rock, with newcomer Jahzir Kadeen Bruno as the brave young hero.—Warner Bros./HBOMax

It may come as a surprise; but, witches are real. They live among us, disguised as ordinary humans, and they feed off fear. Now, whether he likes it or not, an innocent orphaned boy is about to discover the shocking truth behind the demonic creatures, shortly after relocating to late 1960 Demopolis, Alabama, to live with his kind grandmother. And before long, a hair-raising encounter with the supernatural jolts grandma into action, forcing her to take her boy to a luxurious seaside hotel far away from home to protect him. Unfortunately, the otherwise impeccable resort is rife with danger, as a secret coven of fashionable witches is holding its annual conference in plain sight. It seems that their mighty leader, the scheming Grand High Witch of All the World, has hatched a plan, and no one is safe--especially children. Can they escape from their clutches? Will they give the evil witches a dose of their own medicine?—Nick Riganas

According to the narrator, witches live in the real world, side by side among the humans. They could be anyone, your teacher, the sweet lady on the bus or even your nurse. Witches are known to hate children and devising ways to destroy all children. Squishing children is an immensely pleasurable activity for witches.

In 1968, a young boy named Charlie Hansen (Jahzir Bruno) goes to live with his maternal grandmother, Agatha (Octavia Spencer) in Demopolis, Alabama, after a car accident kills his parents in Chicago. Agatha is loving but has a strict set of rules around the house to follow. Agatha can see that Charlie feels lonely and misses his parents. Gradually, Charlie is cheered up by Agatha who buys him a pet mouse whom he names Daisy. Unknown to Charlie, he is noticed by a witch in their neighborhood. Agatha is an expert on creating concoctions using herbs and potions that can cure almost any ailment. Agatha is known as a healer.

One day, Charlie goes to a store to buy a box of nails to train Daisy (Kristin Chenoweth) and to build a house for her as well. The boy is approached by a witch trying to lure him with a snake and a caramel, but Agatha calls him, and the witch disappears.

Charlie tells Agatha about the encounter. Agatha learns that the lady who approached Charlie was wearing long gloves, a towel on her head, and had a rusty voice. Agatha tells Charlie that he was approached by a witch, and that the witches are in fact real. She says a witch cursed her childhood friend Alice into spending the rest of her life as a chicken. Agatha says that she saw Alice accepting candy from a stranger, who turned out to be a witch. The next day Agatha saw Alice transform into a chicken, and when she tried to tell her parents, nobody believed her. Since that day, Agatha gets coughing fits in the presence of witches.

Agatha says that witches never leave once they find a child. Frantically, they decide to stay in a nearby The Grand Imperial Island hotel where her cousin Eston (Philippe Spall) is the executive chef. Mr. R. J Stringer III (Stanley Tucci) is the hotel manager. The hotel is the swankiest in all of Alabama and Agatha believes that they will be safe there as the witches on prey on the poor and the overlooked.

Every country has a secret society for witches called a coven. The coven gets together to discuss their strategies, to trade potion secrets and to receive orders from the Grand High Witch. Legend has it that the Grand High Witch was hatched from the frozen Tundra of Norway. While at the hotel, Agatha teaches Charlie how to tell a witch from an ordinary woman: their mouths are elongated at the edges, almost up to their ears. Real witches have claws instead of fingernails, which they hide by wearing gloves. They are bald, which they hide by wearing wigs that give them rashes. They have square feet with no toes, which they hide by wearing sensible shoes. They have a purple tinge in their pupils and have larger than normal nose holes, for a powerful sense of smell, which they use to sniff out children.

Ever since Agatha has checked into the hotel, she has been having coughing fits. A group of ladies representing the society for prevention of cruelty to children has also checked into the hotel for their convention. The next day, Charlie takes Daisy to do some training at a grand hall. During his walk there, he meets a gluttonous but friendly boy named Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick), who is pulled away by his mother. Charlie then goes into the grand hall, thinking he will be alone. As he is getting ready to train Daisy, a group of witches led by their all-powerful leader, The Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway), enters the grand hall.

Charlie hides under the stage where he realizes that the whole society of women staying at the hotel are a cover for a witch's coven. He overhears the Grand High Witch planning to give the world's children a potion, mixed into confectionery products, that will transform them all into mice (in one hour). Grand High Witch instruct all her subordinates to go back to their towns and open a candy store to distribute said confectionery products to children. She has a trunk full of money in her room which will help the witches to open the candy stores all over the country.

The Grand High Witch waits for Bruno to arrive, to whom she earlier gave a Swiss chocolate bar laced with the potion. The Grand High Witch can smell a child under the stage and rips the stage apart, but Charlie had hidden in the vent in the wall behind by then. After Bruno arrives, he turns into a mouse and enters the vent where Charlie and Daisy are hiding. The Grand High Witch discovers Charlie and forcibly transforms him into a mouse with the potion (which she injects into his ears), before they escape.

Fleeing to the hotel room where Charlie and his grandmother are staying, they tell Agatha about the witches' plan. They discover that the Grand High Witch is staying in the hotel room below them and that Daisy was once an orphaned young human girl named Mary turned into a mouse by a witch. Charlie, Bruno, and Mary devise a plan to get a bottle of the potion so that Agatha can devise a cure to turn them back into children. The plan to get the potion is successful, but since she is unable to create a cure, they instead decide to put the potion into a broth of pea soup which will be given to the witches during their dinner. All the witches drink the soup except the Grand High Witch, who realizes that she met Agatha before. The Grand High Witch was the one who turned Alice into a chicken. While the mice steal the Grand High Witch's room key, the witches all begin turning into rats, and chaos ensues.

After she and the mice flee to the Grand High Witch's room, Agatha starts to collect all the potions to destroy them. The Grand High Witch finds Agatha, and prepares to kill her, but the mice intervene and trick the Grand High Witch into swallowing her own potion, transforming her into a rat. They trap her in an ice bucket and prevent her from escaping.

Before they leave the room, Agatha takes the Grand High Witch's trunk full of money and also releases her cat Hades from its cage. They also take all the unused potion and aim to convert every witch in the world into rats. Now they had the Grand Witches diary, in which she had the names and addresses of each witch in the known world. As they close the door, Hades attacks and kills The Grand High Witch.

Since his parents (Mr. Jenkins (Charles Edwards), Bruno's father & Mrs. Jenkins (Morgana Robinson), Bruno's mother) can no longer accept him, Bruno joins Mary, Charlie, and Agatha to go home with The Grand High Witch's trunk and become a family. Over the following years, Charlie (revealed to be the narrator) and his grandmother use the Grand High Witch's money to fund their travels all over the world, advising young children how to eradicate the witches.