Matilda is a brilliant and sensitive child, but her parents think of her only as a nuisance. Even before she is five years old, she has read Dickens and Hemingway and still her parents think of her as a pest. So she decides to get back at them. Her platinum-haired mother and dodgy car salesman father are no match for her sharp genius, and neither is the cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull. And then she child prodigy discovers she has an extraordinary psychic power that can save her school and especially the lovely teacher, Miss Honey.