The Witches (also marketed as Roald Dahl's The Witches) is a 2020 American fantasy comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis, and written by Zemeckis, Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris. The film was released exclusively to HBO Max on October 22, 2020, although it had an international theatrical run.
Plot[]
In 1968, young Charlie Hansen lives with his grandmother Agatha in Demopolis, Alabama, United States, after a car accident kills his parents in Chicago. Gradually, she cheers him up by buying him a pet mouse whom he names Daisy.
One day, Charlie plans to buy a box of nails to train Daisy and to build a house for her as well. He is approached by a witch trying to lure him with a snake and a caramel, but Agatha calls him, and the witch disappears.
After telling Agatha about the encounter, Charlie learns that 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 witches never leave once they find a child.
Frantically, they decide to stay in a nearby hotel where her cousin Eston was the executive chef. While there, Agatha teaches Charlie how to tell a witch from an ordinary woman: real witches have claws instead of fingernails, which they hide by wearing gloves; are bald, which they hide by wearing wigs that give them rashes; have square feet with no toes, have mouths that can open nearly to their ears, and have a powerful sense of smell aided by extendable nostrils, which they use to sniff out children.
The next day, Charlie takes Daisy and a rope to do some training at a grand hall. During his walk there, he meets a gluttonous but friendly boy named Bruno, who is pulled away by his mother. Charlie visits 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, enters the grand hall. Charlie hides under the stage and overhears her planning to give the world's children a potion, mixed into confectionery products, that will transform them all into mice.
The Grand High Witch waits for Bruno to arrive, to whom she earlier gave a Swiss chocolate bar laced with the potion. After he 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, before they escape.
Fleeing to the hotel room where Charlie and his grandmother are staying, they tell Agatha about the witches' plan and 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 as 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 realises that she met Agatha before, as she was the witch 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 and tries to kill her, but instead the mice intervene, tricking the witch into swallowing her own potion, transforming her into a rat. They trap her in an ice bucket to 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. As they close the door, Hades attacks the Grand High Witch.
As his parents 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 and Agatha travel the world, advising young children to eradicate the witches.
Cast[]
- Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch, the powerful and evil witch who is the leader of all witches in the world. Hathaway also voices her rat form.
- Octavia Spencer as Agatha Hansen, a healer and Charlie's grandmother who is the long-time old enemy of the Grand High Witch.
- Miranda Sarfo Peprah portrays a young version of Agatha.
- Stanley Tucci as Mr. R. J. Stringer III, the hotel manager.
- Jahzir Bruno as Charlie Hansen, a young boy who is turned into a mouse by the Grand High Witch. Bruno also voices his mouse form.
- Chris Rock as the voice of Older Charlie Hansen, the narrator and as an elder mouse who tells the firsthand account of his experience as a child to a group of children.
- Codie-Lei Eastick as Bruno Jenkins, an English boy who is turned into a mouse. Eastick also voices his mouse form.
- Kristin Chenoweth as the voice of Daisy, the boy's pet mouse. It is revealed that she was once a human girl named Mary who ran away from the orphanage and was turned into a mouse by the witches four months prior to the events of the film.
- Charles Edwards as Mr. Jenkins, Bruno's father.
- Morgana Robinson as Mrs. Jenkins, Bruno's mother.
- Josette Simon as Zelda, a witch.
- Eugenia Caruso as Consuella, a witch.
- Ana-Maria Maskell as Esmerelda, a witch.
- Orla O'Rourke as Saoirse, a witch.
- Penny Lisle as Lindsay, a witch.
- Simon Manyonda as Sous-Chef
- Philippe Spall as a Chef
- Brian Bovell as Reginald