Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) and Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) are a childless couple and for medical reasons are doomed to remain so. While on vacation at a house in the country with their neighbors, the Stadlers, Karel decides to buy the house at the suggestion of Mr. Stadler. When he is fixing up the house, he digs up a
tree stump that looks vaguely like a baby. He spends the rest of the evening cleaning it up and then presents it to his wife. She names the stump Otík and starts to treat it like a real baby. She then works out a plan to fake her pregnancy, and becoming more and more impatient, she speeds up the process and 'gives birth' one month early. Otík comes alive and has an insatiable appetite. Alžbětka (Kristina Adamcová), the Stadlers’ daughter, has been suspicious all along, and when she reads the
fairy tale about
Otesánek, the truth becomes clear to her. Meanwhile, little Otík has been just eating and growing. One day, he
eats some of Božena's hair. On another, Božena returns home to find that Otík has eaten their cat. Karel and his wife are then at odds: Karel pushes for killing the creature, while Božena defends it as their child. The baby later consumes a postal worker (Gustav Vondráček) and then a social worker (Jitka Smutná). The resulting deaths lead Karel to tie up and lock Otík away in the basement of their apartment building, leaving Otík to
starve. Alžbětka then secretly takes over as prime caretaker. She tries to keep Otík fed with normal human food, but, when her mother stops her, she is forced to
drawing straws (matches in this case) to choose a person to feed to Otík. The chosen victim is an old man and
pedophile, Mr. Žlábek (Zdeněk Kozák), who has been stalking her recently. Deciding she cannot take the stalking anymore, Alžbětka lures Mr. Žlábek to the basement, where he gets entangled by Otik's vines and devoured. Karel himself later becomes a victim when he comes into the basement with a
chainsaw, but on seeing Otík, he hesitates and calls him "son" before dropping the chainsaw. Afterwards, Božena goes into the basement and is heard screaming, having become a victim herself. In the end, Otík disobeys Alžbětka despite repeated warnings and eats all of Mrs. Správcová's (Dagmar Stříbrná)
cabbage patch, prompting the old woman to take charge.
Ending In the fairy tale upon which the movie is based, the old woman kills Otesánek by splitting his
stomach open with a
hoe; however, the film ends with her descending the stairs, Alžbětka reciting the end of the fairy tale tearfully; the
audience is not allowed to witness the deed. ==Cast==