Amazon Prime’s Spanish thriller film, ‘The Diary,’ examines the precarious relationship between a mother and her daughter—and the influence mysteriously supernatural forces have on their futures. The Emma Bertrán and Alba Gil directorial revolves around Olga, a recently divorced woman who shares custody of the young Vera with the latter’s father, Victor. After moving into her new home, Olga discovers a strange chest in her attic that seemingly contains the journal of a serial killer. Meanwhile, in the wake of her parent’s separation, Vera continues to struggle with her past traumas.
Consequently, as Olga’s peculiar house haunting intersects with her daughter’s conflicted childhood, the mother finds herself recruiting the help of Vera’s therapist, Carlos, to uncover some secrets. The mysteries surrounding Olga’s house are much more convoluted than a simple haunting. As such, once those secrets spill out into the open, they will naturally invite the audience’s intrigue. SPOILERS AHEAD!
The Diary Plot Synopsis
After witnessing the death of her family dog, Nelson, firsthand, a young Vera struggles to cope in the aftermath. Despite sessions with her therapist, Carlos, the kid develops a detachment from the instance, preferring not to speak about it. Still, her divorced parents, Olga and Victor, do their best to support their daughter. On her part, Vera seems to prefer staying with her mother, Olga, who has recently moved into a new house. Still, since she shares custody with Victor, the kid has to stay at his house often, where—much to the kid’s chagrin—her father’s girlfriend, Mariana, joins them.
During one such day without Vera in the house, Olga experiences some strange occurrences, including deafening noises and hallucinations of inexplicable phantoms. She also learns that the strange chest she found in the attic earlier doesn’t belong to the previous owners. With her curiosity piqued, the woman goes through the box’s contents and finds a bizarre diary inside, which contains entries of gruesome human experimentations. Appropriately spooked by the macabre box, Olga puts it out in the trash—only to find it has once again materialized in her attic. However, a phone call informing her about an accident involving Vera interrupts her ensuing freak-out.
As it turns out, Vera had cut herself with a knife while Mariana was watching over her. The woman remains immensely apologetic but also finds it difficult to hide her worry that the kid may have intentionally harmed herself. In the aftermath, the doctors quickly discharge Vera. Nevertheless, Olga remains apprehensive about taking the kid back to her presumably haunted house. As a result, she lies about a gas leak and crashes at Victor’s place. The next morning, she recruits Carlos’ help and decides to face the eerie chest. Although the psychologist is initially skeptical, he can’t refute the truth once he witnesses the box’s inexplicable re-appearance in the attic.
Consequently, after the duo pours over the journal’s contents, Carlos decides to have a graphologist colleague overlook the diary entries. As per the expert’s evaluation, the journal was recently written by a woman who expertly hides her real personality from the world. Furthermore, she is able to discern that the author must have discovered her interest in killing after she accidentally killed someone close to her. Even so, the most startling realization comes when the graphologist reveals that the journal is being written in real time. The revelation, paired with a few more run-ins with the author’s phantom at her house, pushes Olga to seek out Martin, one of the victims mentioned in the diary. The same brings another jarring discovery as it leads the duo to discover that Martin is actually just a young boy.
Since the diary speaks of Martin’s death when he is well into his thirties, Olga realizes that the journal and the chest it came in must be artifacts of the future. Much like the phantom of the author in the house, these objects have also somehow made their way into Olga’s life in a more corporeal form. In the wake of the discovery, Olga begins to notice otherwise inconspicuous details about Vera, such as her recent motor disability—a trait she apparently shares with the homicidal author from the future. Thus, all her suspicions slot into place once Victor brings a gift for Vera—a wooden chest identical to the one Olga found in her attic.
The Diary Ending: What Happened to Nelson?
Once Victor brings the wooden chest for Vera, it all but confirms to Olga that her daughter is the diary’s author. Naturally, the realization sends the mother into a downward spiral of wondering what she could’ve done wrong to raise a kid who would eventually grow up to be a serial killer. The mother already harbors concerns about her kid’s issues—particularly due to her past with Nelson. In reality, Vera’s experience with her dog’s death was much more traumatic than assumed.
In the past, while Vera and her parents were on a hike with Nelson, the dog ended up getting wounded fatally. Although Victor managed to find a man who could drive them out of the woods to seek medical help for Nelson, the man insisted that it would be kinder to kill the dog right then. Victor vehemently disagreed with the opinion and, in agitation, passed a wounded Nelson to young Vera when the latter asked for him. As such, while her parents worried about the situation in the background, Vera killed Nelson to put him out of his misery and neutralize the problem.
As a result, Vera has now developed a complex wherein she is able to dissolve herself of responsibility for her actions as long as her parents deflect their own responsibilities. In fact, Carlos believes that Vera used the same logic and intentionally cut herself to incriminate Mariana’s parenting skills. By this point, Olga becomes increasingly distraught due to the likelihood of her daughter’s bleak future coming true.
Does Vera Kill Mariana? Who is Her First Victim?
Despite the disturbing revelations about Vera, Carlos convinces Olga that they can prevent such a future from unfolding for the kid by preventing her from committing the murder that will trigger her homicidal urges. Thanks to the graphologist’s insight, they know that Nelson’s death hasn’t cemented Vera’s homicidal urges. Instead, it will be a second killing—of someone close to Vera—that will set off her darker impulses. After Olga notices Mariana sporting an earring identical to the one inside the attic chest, she concludes that her husband’s girlfriend must be Vera’s first human victim.
Since Vera already dislikes Mariana to the point where she refuses to spend time with her father because of her, Vera’s possible motivations for the killing remain apparent. In a stroke of awful timing, Olga has a run-in with the phantom, and she accidentally injures young Vera. Consequently, the mother begins confining Vera to the house, allowing her to skip school under the guise of bad health. In actuality, she’s trying to keep an eye on the girl to ensure the future doesn’t come to fruition.
Even though Vera has no issues with her isolation, Victor quickly takes notice of his ex’s breach of their custody agreement. As a result, once he realizes his daughter is isolated and injured, he takes Vera away with him. However, this only leads to adverse outcomes. Vera has made her displeasure with Mariana known repeatedly and continues to remain cold toward her. The same, paired with the fact that the girl lied to her father about her health, leads to an argument that compels Vera to grow even more distanced from Victor.
As a result, that night, Vera turns to adverse actions and enters Victor and Mariana’s room armed with a pair of scissors. Nevertheless, before Olga’s nightmares can come true, Mariana wakes up, foiling the kid’s plans to possibly hurt her. Once Victor realizes what is happening, he takes the kid away from Mariana and confronts her in the hallway about her actions. His frantic questionings overwhelm Vera, who ends up pushing her father down the stairs, leading to his death. Ultimately, Vera commits her first murder with her father as her first victim.
Why Does Olga Crash the Car? Does She Survive?
Even though Olga and Carlos try to prevent the night’s events from unfolding, Vera ends up committing her father’s murder. In Olga’s mind, the same secures the idea that her daughter will grow up to be a psychotic killer who will torture her victims until their deaths. Despite the impossibility of Olga’s hallucinations of the phantom and the diary’s existence, these elements continue to be a fixed truth. Somehow, Vera’s phantom and her chest of secrets have crossed over time and space, arriving years into the past to allow her mother a glimpse into her daughter’s future. While Olga hoped the same would help her prevent the future from coming to fruition, Victor’s death proves to her that she can’t save Vera anymore.
For the same reason, after the authorities arrive on the scene to deal with the situation and take in Vera’s statements, Olga brings her daughter back home with her. However, as they drive down the road in the early morning hours, Vera surprises her mother with her startling lack of empathy. Despite having recently killed her father, the kid seems to hold no remorse and is only concerned with whether or not she will be made to return to her father’s house in the future. Therefore, the woman makes a decision once Olga realizes that her daughter is callously apathetic to everyone around her—be it her injured dog or her father.
Olga has extensively read up on the horrors she thinks Vera will one day inflict on others. As such, she only sees one way out of the predicament: she must kill her daughter. For the same reason, the mother steers the car into a crash, condemning herself and Vera to the same fate. Nevertheless, as Olga wakes in a hospital ward—injured but alive—she realizes her plan has failed spectacularly. In the end, both the mother and her daughter survive—knowing that the former just tried to seal their fates.
Will Vera Become a Killer?
In the end, the final question that the film leaves the audience with remains Vera’s predestined predicament. Through the apparition in Olga’s house and the chest in the attic, it’s evident that Vera would have turned into a serial killer in the future. Nonetheless, Olga attempts to use these to her advantage to set her daughter up for a different path in her future. However, by allowing herself to become so strongly influenced by these signs, she ends up writing a self-fulfilling prophecy for Vera.
According to the graphologist, the diary’s author—the future Vera—only discovered her fascination with murder after committing her first human kill. Nonetheless, it was actually another instance that pushed her to act on her homicidal impulses. Through the diary, the graphologist can tell that someone tried to kill the author when she was a child, which triggered her desire to harm others. Nevertheless, after reading about the explicit details of future Vera’s torture, Olga remains more concerned with the harm her daughter can inflict upon others.
Consequently, Olga arrives at the conclusion that she must kill Vera. In turn, this becomes the instance in which Vera’s trust is cruelly betrayed by her own mother. Therefore, after the two survive the crash and the kid asks her mother if she truly meant to kill her, it sets Vera up on the path Olga had dreaded from the start. Thus, in a way, Olga and Vera’s destinies become cyclic as their pasts feed their futures, with the diary becoming a self-perpetuating cycle.
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