The Chalk Line Ending Explained- What Happened To Clara, Who Was The Kidnapper, And Why Maita Did What She Did

Netflix has a knack for picking quality foreign language thrillers. The latest import to drop, The Chalk Line or Jaula in Spanish, is a tightly-wound, quick-paced who-done-it that cleverly presents as a Bad Seed-style story. The truth is darker than a supernatural kid, though. A monster is unmasked as a cycle of violence is revealed.

One night Paula and Simón are driving at night when they find a little girl walking in the middle of the road. She appears dazed and runs directly at a motorcyclist when Paula and Simón get out of their car to try to help her. The motorcyclist crashes and barely misses the young girl, who they immediately take to the hospital. She is malnourished and combative. After a battery of tests, the doctors find that her kidneys are compromised. After several weeks her body begins to heal, but she remains mute and deeply troubled. With no sign of her parents, the doctors turn to Paula and Simón, who had been visiting her daily and had developed a tenuous bond.

Her psychiatrist warns Paula that this won’t be a typical foster situation. Clara is terrified to leave the chalked area she lives in. Anything inside the chalked pattern with her is fine, but outside is frightening to her. This is why she was so aggressive with the hospital staff anytime they tried to get her to leave her square.

The couple takes Clara home and begins devising a way for Clara to live more freely with them. Paula drew chalk lines all over the house so Clara could go from room to room without leaving her chalk lines. Days pass, and Paula and Clara grow closer. They move furniture and roll up carpets to make Clara feel more comfortable. The doctor comes to the house to work with her, and things don’t go well initially. She tries to make her leave her square and go outside, but Paula’s maternal instinct kicks in, and she runs to the child. During this episode, Clara shouts words they don’t recognize at first. She is unable to explain where she came from, and the session ends when Clara gets upset.

After days without incident, the couple has a dinner party, and their friends arrange a playdate with their daughter the next day. Before they can play, however, Paula’s friend finds a shard of glass in her throat after eating jam and toast. She is fine, but now Simón thinks Clara did it. While at the store, Simón sees a word on the chalk box that they realize is German. They now know she is most likely German.

Armed with this new information, the psychiatrist contacts the police to have them search for missing children in Germany. Shortly after this, Clara goes missing. Paula eventually finds her, and Clara makes her beautiful paper fans while she tries to ask her about what she is so scared of. The poor, traumatized girl is incapable of communicating her trauma though and becomes violent. They try to translate, but she refuses to talk to them and offers a hand-drawn picture instead. The picture is of a square with what appears to be bars and green filling the space. However, Paula does not understand what she is trying to communicate, and Clara becomes angry. The psychiatrist tells her it isn’t working out and Clara will have to go elsewhere soon.

While trying to decipher Clara’s words, Paula chokes on a shard of glass in her tea. She is able to extract it before too much damage is done, but when she comes out of the bathroom, Clara is missing, and the door is open. The police don’t believe her because of the previous missing incident, but Paula insists she was kidnapped. After the police leave, Simón confronts Paula about her IVF treatments. They had tried for six years and decided to stop for a year to regroup. Paula, however, did not want to quit trying and had been secretly continuing the injections. Simón was very angry with her and thought Paula had been hiding lots of things from him. He accused her of being obsessed with Clara, and a nasty fight ensues.

The next day Paula gets a call from Clara, but she hangs up before she can figure out where she is. When she goes to the police station, they trace the call and determine that the call from Clara came from her cell phone. Now everyone thinks Paula is unstable. Later she reads through the missing persons file she stole from the police and recognizes the same paper fan that Clara made in one of the crime scene photos. She also watches footage of the girl’s parents from the crime photo. They beg for the return of their daughter, who was only twelve at the time. In the video pictures of the missing girl’s room, Paula sees folded paper crafts like the ones that Clara had been making. This missing girl said they were guardian angels that looked after her when bad things happened.

She next finds a picture Clara drew that now makes sense. The picture is taken from the perspective of her room, looking towards Eduardo’s house. When Paula looks out the window, she sees Eduardo looking back at her. She calls the police and goes to his house under the guise of borrowing some maps. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of The Chalk Line, who the kidnapper was, and what really happened to Clara.

The ending of The Chalk Line

At the film’s end, Paula tries to find Clara in Eduardo’s house, but he beats her with a hammer and drags her into the basement. The police arrive at Eduardo’s home but find nothing, as he was able to clean up the blood before they arrive. He next goes down into the basement and tortures Paula. She tells him she called the police and she knows about Ingrid. He leaves to try to get the police file from Paula’s car, and Clara tries to escape. She gets the door open and sees Clara in the next room. That is when she learns exactly what happened to Clara and Ingrid. Before she can escape, Eduardo comes back and sees that Clara is missing. Paula gave her a piece of chalk that she could use to draw herself a path out of the house.

Paula buys her time while Clara draws and erases chalk lines to freedom. She locks Eduardo in the basement with Paula and continues out of the house. Clara is terrified but determined to save herself and Paula. She yells for Simón to help her because she is so scared to cross the threshold. Just when she enters the yard, Maita finds her and drags her back to the house. Luckily the police return and find a chalk handprint on the door and realize what has happened. They rescue the girls, and we next see Paula, still with Simón and finally pregnant, talking to Clara at her grandparents’ house. Ingrid’s parents are now raising her. She is healing mentally and physically, and everyone is happy.

Why did Maita take Clara back?

The Chalk Line is about abuse. First, it was Ingrid’s kidnapping, rape, and torture, followed by Clara’s abuse. Eduardo killed Ingrid when she became too much trouble. However, he planned on continuing the cycle of torture and rape on Clara. Maita, who was also an abuse victim, planned to help her husband hide his crimes so that she could have freedom. She had been controlled and abused for so long that she could no longer think rationally about what was right or wrong. Maita wanted to protect her son’s from their father’s crimes and wanted to be able to live her own life. She did not know about the abuse prior to finding Clara but used it as collateral to get what she wanted.

What happened to Clara?

Clara had been kept hostage by Simón and Paula’s neighbor Eduardo. Clara was out on the street because Eduardo had ordered her out of the car and told her to walk the chalk line on the road. He was worried she would be found at the police checkpoint. Eduardo had been pretending to be close to Paula and Simón to keep tabs on the girl and plant evidence to make it appear Clara was dangerous.

He put pieces of a broken wine glass in the jam and was also the person who snuck into the house and hid Clara the first time she went missing. He is a monster who controls his wife, Maite. She can’t go anywhere or do anything without his approval. Although we don’t see any abuse, he obviously hurts her, and she has tried to escape him for some time. Eduardo had been insinuating himself in their lives since they first found Clara.

Clara had been kept in the basement along with Ingrid, the twelve-year-old taken from Malta years ago. Ingrid is Clara’s mother. Eduardo had been holding and raping Ingrid for years, and when she became pregnant, he kept Clara and trained her to be afraid of leaving the chalk lines he drew. If she ever left the chalk enclosure, he would punish her. This is why she was so terrified in the hospital and later at Paula’s house. A form of brainwashing based on punishment was used to control the young girl.

In the end, Eduardo was a terrible person who had tainted his wife with his evilness. She was also a victim of his but chose to protect herself and her boys instead of revealing Eduardo’s crimes. The Chalk Line’s ending proves that good still lives in the world and bravery comes in small packages. The Chalk Line is currently streaming on Netflix.