| Director | Lampros Kordolaimis, Oz Perkins |
|---|---|
| Budget | $5 million |
| Box office | $22.3 million |
The prologue opens with a story about "a beautiful child with a pretty pink hat", a mortally wounded baby girl. Her father takes her to the woods to be cured by a witch, who performs healing spells, bestowing supernatural abilities on the child in the process. As the girl grows up, the villagers come to hear her premonitions, but her wicked nature is soon revealed when she begins murdering innocent people, including her own father. The rest of the village imprison her in the woods, where she begins to lure children to their deaths.
The scene shifts to teenage Gretel, who often takes care of her younger brother, Hansel, and is implied to also have some sort of supernatural powers. As their father dies, their mother sends them out to find work. Gretel is offered a housekeeping job but turns it down when the master of the house asks about her virginity. Their mother rebukes Gretel for failing to provide for them and threatens to kill both children if they do not leave the house.
The siblings flee and find temporary accommodation for the night, but a ghoulish man appears and attacks Hansel. A huntsman saves the children and takes them to his home for the night, before sending them off to find work the next morning. They get lost in the woods and, suffering from hunger, are attracted by the scent of baked cake to a hut in the forest, in which a woman named Holda lives. She invites the children in for a meal and allows them to stay, in exchange for performing work around the house. Hansel is sent into the woods to practice woodcutting with an axe, while Gretel assists with housekeeping. Hansel is happy with their new home, but Gretel is suspicious of Holda and troubled by disturbing visions and nightmares. Sensing Gretel's abilities, Holda initiates her into witchcraft and teaches her to levitate her wooden staff with the aid of flying ointment.
Hansel soon becomes wary of Holda after discovering a satanic pentagram carved into a tree. The siblings have an argument that night, and Hansel leaves the hut and is then lured into a trap by Holda. Gretel confronts the witch, who insists she is doing Gretel a favour by getting rid of Hansel. It is then revealed that Holda was the mother of the wicked girl from the prologue story; Holda loathed her daughter for killing her husband and other innocents and was the one who imprisoned her in the woods. In order to get revenge on her daughter, Holda ate children to gain magical powers, killed her daughter, and took her place at the cottage, luring in children, in the guise of an elderly woman.
Holda drugs Gretel and straps her down in the cellar, where she plans for Hansel to be eaten. Now in the form of a young woman, Holda lures Hansel into a cage atop a large fire pit so she can cook him. Gretel manages to free herself and uses flying ointment on her hands and face to levitate a wooden staff and pin Holda against the wall, where she slowly burns to death over the fire, which causes the spells she has cast to cease working. This awakens Hansel from his drugged state.
The next morning, Gretel assures her brother that Holda is gone for good and sends him back home (their mother is implied to have died in the meantime and Hansel should be able to start working at home as a woodsman). Gretel stays behind to hone her craft. She sees the ghosts of the children murdered by Holda, now finally free to pass on.
In the closing moments, her fingertips begin to turn black, just as Holda's had been.