The film opens with a married couple, Simon and Paula,
driving past a series of police cars at night. They resume their journey on a dimly-lit road,
where they suddenly come across someone in the middle of the road. The two then rush out of
the car, and it is discovered to be a young girl. They try to call out to the girl but
she remains silent and keeps walking. As they try to move the little girl out of the way,
the girl instead starts running toward a motorcycle that is speeding toward her.
As a result, the motorcycle guy ends up tumbling down the street,
also knocking the child out in the process.
Simon and Paula rush her to the hospital, where
the doctor informs them that the motorcycle didn’t hit her, but the girl was already very sick.
The police also show up and inform the couple that they’re unable to find the little girl’s parents.
The couple goes home in the morning, and here we learn that Paula is on a fertility treatment,
as she can be seen injecting herself with some medication.
But fascinatingly, she is hiding this from her husband.
Later that day, they decide to visit the young girl,
and the doctor tells them that the little girl refuses to speak, but they learned her name
is Clara because she reacted very strongly to it when a nurse with the same name was called.
The couple then walks into a room, where Clara is wildly thrashing about, while the
nurses try to move her out of there. When Paula notices this, she jumps into the chalk box to
embrace the poor kid, which calms her down.
On the following day, they pay Clara yet
another visit. This time, Clara is tied to the hospital bed, as the staff claims
that she is a danger to herself. However, Simon disregards this and tries to untie her, until a
nurse catches him and kicks the couple out.
That next morning, Simon announces to his
wife that he can’t seem to stop thinking about Clara, and on their next visit to the hospital,
the resident psychologist ask if they could foster Clara, as her kidney condition is improving.
But the doctor remains concerned about her mental growth, and determines that the hospital is not the
best place for Clara to stay temporarily. Since Clara has built a bond with them, the couple takes
up the offer, until her real family is found.
Their neighbor, Eduardo and his wife Maite,
pay them a visit that day, where they feel like the girl will be better cared
for by the professionals, but the hospital advises that this was the only good option.
Later on that day, Clara is taken home and tucked into bed in her room.
They set up a makeshift bed for her, and draw a chalk line around her
as advised by the hospital. As discovered by the psychologist, Clara is a child with special needs,
who is deathly terrified of the idea of walking outside the confines of a chalk line.
They make her breakfast in the morning, and decide to hang around, until sometime later,
Paula notices that Clara has been staring at a potted plant by the window, so she decides
to bring it inside the chalk line for her. Clara seems thrilled about this, and begins observing
the item, so Paula tries testing her boundaries by pulling the plant outside the chalk line to see
if Clara would reach for it. But unfortunately, Clara still refuses to step outside of this line.
Only after Paula draws a new chalk line does Clara dare venturing further and further.
And so, Paula takes it up a notch by gradually expanding the chalk line,
until it covers the entirety of the house. The young Clara seems grateful for this;
she can now move freely as long as it's within the lines, while the couple grows more fond of her.
On the next day, the psychologist visits the house for behavioural therapy with Clara,
which involves slowly erasing the chalk line around the little girl, causing her to panic.
Paula and Simon are told to wait next door, but Paula can’t help the sound of her screams so she
rushes to her aid. It is at this point that she speaks for the first time, and one of the things
she screamed is a word that sounds like ‘Buma.’ Later on, the psychologist lingers for a while,
and does a voice recording while she tries asking Clara some questions about where’s her house.
Clara faintly whispers several faints, foreign words including ‘Kreide,’ which no one
can understand their meaning.
After the psychologist left,
Paula approaches the anxious little girl, and softly tells her that they won’t let
anything bad happen to her. Clara appreciates this, and makes her an origami as a gift.
That evening, the couple attends a weekly dinner with their neighbours,
whose names are Claudia and her husband Beltran, also Eduardo and his wife Maite.
Paula and Simon explain to them how Clara is doing. When they realize that Paula needs a glass
of water, Eduardo offers to go get one for her.
As a gesture of good faith, Claudia pays a visit
on the next day, so Clara could play with her daughter. The two women sit down in the kitchen
and munch on some bread and jam. But unexpectedly, the neighbor starts bleeding out of her mouth, and
found a piece of glass inside. After Simon gets home and learns about what happened, he believes
that someone might have inserted glass shards inside the jams. Here they can also see how close
the lines are to the fridge, but Paula dismisses the possibility of Clara being the culprit.
Shortly after buying more chalks, Simon finds the same word Clara used when she
was asked about her house: "Kreide" which means chalk in another language.
That evening, the psychologist shows up again with the discovery that Clara was mouthing
morbid German words yesterday, and here they come across translated words like punishment and fear.
And so, they try to translate the final word, 'Buma´, but turns up empty handed.
The doctor quickly leaves to alert the police, so they can start investigation for missing girls in Germany.
To test whether or not Clara is actually German, while playing puzzle with her,
Paula tries speaking German, and as it turns out Clara understands, but refuses
to speak when asked if her parents are German.
They get interrupted by the violent rattle of
the washing machine, prompting Paula to check it out and discover the house key in there.
She then returns to the puzzle, but Clara isn’t there. She tries to look around the house,
but still the little girl is nowhere to be found, prompting her to panic. Paula even
goes outside asks a neighbor passing by if she saw anything, but the neighbor says she didn't.
Shortly after she returns to the house, she calms down after finding the little in the kitchen,
sipping on some juice with her husband.
Paula is now concerned about her, so she tries to
get her to either speak or draw what is it exactly that she’s afraid of. She questions
her about “Buma” which is the last word they couldn't translate, but the little girl won’t
communicate with her. Frustrated, Paula threatens to erase the chalk line, so Clara kicks her.
While this is going on, she also notices Eduardo the neighbor watching from his window, and waves
to her before she leaves the room. The therapist comes over later that day, announcing that Claudia
has told everyone in the neighborhood about how Clara put glass in the jam. Moments later,
Clara comes up from downstairs with an odd drawing, which Paula is unable to interpret.
Seeing the child's behavior, the doctor thinks that Clara isn't getting any better
from their arrangement, so the government will likely decide to take Clara away.
Paula is now disheartened by the fact that Clara is going to be taken from her, but could do
nothing about it. So with the remaining time she has with the little girl, she decides to go on
Google translate, and tries every single possible spelling combination that sounds like ‘Buma.’
She then makes herself a cup of tea, before going back to her research. The voice recorder then plays the
part where the psychologist asks Clara who she lives with. Here Paula discovers that the word
is actually "buhmann," which means "boogieman." But then, she feels something stuck on her throat,
and realizes that there’s glass inside her drink. Paula starts coughing up blood right then, and is
now in immense pain, while Clara is unwilling to let her outside the chalk line.
Paula then heads to the bathroom, and uses a tweezer to fish out the glass stuck inside her throat.
Once she’s finished, she finds Clara missing and the front door open. Paula is absolutely convinced
that the girl has been kidnapped, because Clara would never go beyond the chalk-marked boundaries.
The police are informed, and they start looking for the girl. Later that night, they found Clara’s
discarded jacket in the woods. This worries Paula greatly, and she doesn't believe the detectives
when they say Clara ran away on her own. She could barely sleep the rest of the night,
and on the next day,
Simon confronts her about how he doesn’t think Clara should be living with them anymore,
and that he found out about Paula’s secret fertility injections. He’s hurt by this discovery,
as it turns out the couple has spent years trying to get pregnant to no avail, but as of recent,
they both agreed to finally stop trying. Judging from the way Paula is behaving now,
he thinks Paula is so desperate to have a child that she’s in denial of all the bad things that
have happened ever since they took Clara in. To prove his point, he takes Clara’s penguin
plushie, and reveals glass shards tucked inside its pocket, leaving Paula speechless.
But despite it all, Paula still cares deeply about the girl.
Later that day, she receives a call on her landline, and hears Clara’s voice there,
repeatedly saying mama before hanging up.
She reports this to the police, who traces the caller, and discovers that the call came from
Paula’s mobile phone.
Paula is dumbfounded
and insists that she’s not delusional, but the officers don’t believe her. Because of this claim,
she is forced to have a psychological examination, and they confiscate her phone.
Here the determined Paula decides to take matters into her own hands, and sneakily steals
a bunch of German case files that the police are currently looking at to investigate Clara’s case.
There are two types of case files, one of missing girls, and the other of crimes
against girls. The latter contains a report on the discovery of a teenage girl’s dead body,
stating that she was raped and beaten prior to her death, however, the dead girl’s identity
remains unknown to this day. What’s shocking is, one picture taken from the crime scene
shows an origami akin to what Clara made for her. Paula then takes note of the name of the coroner
who made the report, and pays her a visit. The coroner helps her to understand the no identity girl's document,
and tells her that the dead teenage girl had a set of weak kidneys, and a lazy eye.
This yet again fascinates Paula, as one file in the missing girls folders depict a German
girl named Ingrid with a lazy eye; a medical condition where one eye is weaker than the other.
After looking up the girl’s name, Paula watches a news report from several years
ago of Ingrid’s parents, pleading for help in finding their daughter,
who was kidnapped from a beach in Malaga and was never to be seen again. She also finds more
evidence of the same origami at Ingrid's house, providing further evidence
linking the case of the girl with no identity girl to Ingrid.
Afterwards, Paula returns home and studies the drawing Clara made for her. She then begins to
understand how the drawing depicts a view from one window outside of Paula and Simon’s house,
which provides a direct view to their neighbors, Eduardo and Maite’s house. Noticing that Eduardo
is always staring at her window, Paula is convinced that something’s off with him.
She immediately alerts the police to investigate Eduardo’s place of residence, and convinces them
that he has something to do with Ingrid. Following that, she decides to enter Eduardo's house.
The movie then takes us to the past, just moments before Paula and Simon discovered Clara.
As it turns out, Eduardo drove down the same road, and he was the one who placed
Clara in the middle of the road, and told her that he’s going to come back for her after her
health got better. It's also revealed that he was the one who taught her that she had
to remain confined inside lines of chalk, and told her to walk by following the white line.
And the night he went to get a glass for Paula, Eduardo planted glass shards inside the jam and
milk, possibly in attempt to make Clara look like a troubled child. He was also the one who planted
the house keys inside the washing machine, and that one time Clara briefly went missing,
it was because Eduardo had snuck in and attempted to take Clara back but failed. And lastly,
he was the one who took her phone to make the call to her house before secretly giving it back.
Back to present time, Paula enters the psychopath’s home under the guise of
picking up a map that his wife Maite needs to search for Clara. As Eduardo goes away
to look for the map, Paula sneaks around to look for the little girl,
until she decides to leave. But the door is locked, and then...
Eduardo shows up and stabs her with the sharp end of a hammer and takes her captive.
Like every other movie psycho, he has a hidden door leading to an underground basement.
As Paula gets taken there, she finally sees Clara in there, surrounded by chalk lines,
though the child only watches in fear as Paula gets dragged into another room.
After he cleans the mess, the police arrive to question him. He smoothly talks his way
out of the situation, and returns downstairs. Here he takes a torture device, and begins
strangling Paula and chains her neck against a pole, before asking her how she could possibly
found out about this. To clarify based on the evidence stacked so far, here’s what happened:
Eduardo kidnapped a German little girl named Ingrid and kept her captive for the past few
years, until one day, she got pregnant and he let her keep the baby. As you could probably guess,
Clara was the baby. And so, Ingrid raised Clara in captivity, which explains why the
little girl understands German. Until one day, Eduardo decided to murder Ingrid and
dump her body. Since then, he’s been raising Clara on his own but eventually was forced to
take her out of the house, because her weak kidney requires serious medical treatment.
Back to Paula, she admits that she’s been studying Ingrid’s case files and put two and two together,
so Eduardo takes away her car keys and goes to fetch the incriminating evidence.
While he’s away, Paula struggles to reach for the door, and manages to open it. Afterwards,
she starts throwing the chalk she kept in her pocket for Clara to reach. After the little
girl holds the chalk, Paula convinces her to no longer be afraid and start making her
own rules. And thus, Clara takes the chalk, and starts drawing her own chalk line on the floor.
When Eduardo returns, he notices Clara gone and is livid.
He starts assaulting Paula to get her to reveal Clara’s whereabouts, meanwhile Clara uses this
opportunity to escape, and lock Eduardo and Paula inside. She slowly draws the chalk line
on the stairs, then moves on to the kitchen, and so on until she makes it to the front door.
When she realizes she can't keep drawing on the ground, she starts screaming at Simon next door,
but he's too busy on the phone reporting his wife missing. Fearing for Paula’s life,
she gathers the courage to finally step out of the house, and heads towards Simon's house.
This is when she gets interrupted by Maite, Eduardo’s wife. She captures Clara,
and takes her back inside by force, revealing to us that she’s aware of
her husband’s evil deeds this entire time. In the morning, we find Eduardo comfortably
sleeping in his bed, signifying that Clara is now back in captivity.
But as Maite opens the front door to get some air, special forces barge in,
and apprehend the husband and wife, having seen Clara's handprint on the door.
The police found Clara and Paula in the basement, and take the boogieman and Maite in handcuffs.
The movie ends with a time jump, wherein Paula and Clara are having
a cheerful video-call as Clara is currently on vacation in Germany, visiting Ingrid’s parents
aka her grandparents. It appears that the child is now living a normal life,
free of abuse and trauma, while we can see that Paula's finally pregnant.