The Snow Girl Ending Explained: Who Kidnapped Amaya Martín? Who Find Amaya?
The Spanish Netflix thriller The Snow Girl (La chica de nieve) is based on the homonymous novel by Javier Castillo. It is divided into three timelines: in 2010, the year that little Amaya Martn vanishes during the Three Kings parade in Malaga; in 2016, the year that the journalist Miren receives a VHS tape; and in 2016, the year that the case is finally resolved. Jess Mesas Silva and Javier Andrés Roig’s series begins with the girl going missing and the relentless search for her parents. Inspector Belén Millán (Aixa Villagrán) and trainee journalist Miren (Milena Smit), with the assistance of journalist Eduardo (José Coronado), oversee the investigation. According to the initial clues, the balloon seller is one of the possible suspects. He did not have any connection to Amaya’s kidnapping, despite selling illegal goods and drugs. David Luque, a family friend, is later the subject of an investigation by the police due to his suspicious past.
The newest miniseries of the streaming service, the Spanish, The Show Girl, arrived yesterday in the Netflix catalog. With the greatest success among subscribers, the production has the backdrop of the suffering of the Martín family, who have to face the disappearance of little Amaya on the day of the Reis Magos parade. The story takes place in Malaga, in 2010, and shows the trajectory of Miren, a journalist in training who dives deep into an investigation parallel to the police to find the girl. What she barely imagines is that her action will result in unfolding events that will unearth unpleasant events from her past. With the help of her colleague Eduardo, the young woman will not rest until she can answer the question about where the girl is.
The Snow Girl: The Story Plot
The Snow Girl takes us to Malaga, to the famous parade on the day of the Three Kings, a moment in which the crowd gathers in the street and in which the tragedy hangs over a married couple who lose their daughter, the little Amaya in a moment of carelessness that marks a before and after in their lives. From that moment on, Inspector Millán leads an investigation that soon comes to a standstill as she has no clues to go by. It will be Miren, a trainee journalist at the newspaper Sur, who, with the help of her teacher Eduardo de Ella, unravels what has happened to Amaya thanks to her tenacity and her involvement with the people she interviews.
The case will turn upside down when, years after the girl’s disappearance, they receive a videotape in which a young woman is seen in a room. Is it proof of life? Are they looking to blackmail their parents? Is it really about Amaya? They both cling to the hope of getting their daughter back while Miren wrestles with her ghosts of hers. Developing in different temporal planes, the series takes us through the land of nightmares to discover the B side of society: the ins and outs of child exploitation networks, human trafficking and the holes through which the most disturbing people escape. and harmful. Finding similarities with real and documented cases is not difficult, which makes your hair stand on end.
The story of The Snow Girl is indeed quite powerful: a little girl disappears in the middle of the Three Kings Parade without a trace. Here is the first problem: I understand that Netflix and those responsible for the adaptation have wanted to cover the original novel, set in New York during the Thanksgiving parade, and transfer it to our traditional Three Kings Parade. On the one hand, I don’t understand why it opens on January 27 and not at Christmas. And on the other hand, part of what made the original book great remains along the way. Fortunately, the mystery is well executed, and a large part of the original story is embodied in the script written by Jesús Mesas Silva and Javier Andrés Roig.
But unfortunately, a protagonist as interesting as Miren, the intern for the Sur newspaper in Malaga, is blurred by an overacting, excessive, tiresome Milena Smit. On a few occasions, it is so evident that the character eats the interpreter because Milena Smith is a great actress as she already demonstrated last year in Parallel Mothers. But Miren’s traumas are too big for her. Loreto Mauleón, on the contrary, eats up the screen with each glance, each gesture, each tear. Her character is the ‘easiest’ if she can be called that: a mother was broken by the disappearance of her daughter. The rest? Well, José Coronado plays José Coronado, but in journalist mode. Cecilia Freire at times seems more like a caricature than an interpretation. And the rest… No big fanfare.
The Snow Girl Ending Explained: Who Kidnapped Amaya Martín?
In 2019, a second video is shown, and the message that comes with it makes Ana worry about the worst. The phrase “goodbye” alone suggests that this is the final tape and that Amaya may be killed. Ana and Alvaro, who are no longer together, offer a reward to locate her daughter. Amaya, on the other hand, picks up a new trail that takes her to a shop where they fix old gadgets like the VHS recorder. She acquires a name there: Molina Iris She is questioned about Foster and Luque’s deaths, so she is unable to immediately follow the trail.
Beginning with the fifth episode of “The Snow Girl,” the kidnappers’ point of view is presented: Iris Molina and her husband were Dr. Ana Martn’s patients. The couple tried for a long time to have a child, even going through treatment, but they didn’t succeed, and they ran out of money over time. Santiago and Iris attended the Three Kings parade in January 2010 and observed their doctor content with her family. Iris decided to kidnap Amaya rather than bring her to her parents when she discovered that she was missing. She began referring to her as Julia and kept her isolated throughout.
Who Find Amaya?
Amaya used to cry for her real mother at first, but eventually, she got used to Iris and forgot about her old life. She was instructed to run away from “bad people” whenever someone approached her house. Iris decided to send the first tape when she heard Ana worried that her daughter was dead. However, Ana was unwilling to give up Julia because she killed a bank collector to show Ana that she had seen Amaya.
Santiago passes away a few months before the final tape is sent, and Iris decides to move in with her “daughter.” But Miren drives over to her house and asks her a few questions before she gets it. The journalist is certain that the girl she has been looking for nine years is in that house after the kidnapper fails in her attempt to kill her. Miren decides to stay and watch over Iris after notifying the police, and when she discovers that Iris intends to flee, she follows her in her car. Iris removes her seat belt and crashes the vehicle to avoid being noticed. The girl is extremely frightened and perplexed, so the journalist takes the gun and fires it as the journalist tries to get closer to her. Miren, who can hold Amaya down, is not seriously injured by the bullet.
Ana and lvaro get their daughter back at the end of the first season of “The Snow Girl,” but she still has a long road ahead of her. Two years later, Miren publishes a book with the same name as the Netflix series. This book is about the white noise that is heard when a videotape is turned off, not the meteorological phenomenon. Miren receives an envelope with the following message after her book has been presented: Would you like to play? and the caption on the polaroid of a girl tied up: 2012, Laura Valdivia Everything seems to suggest that the successful journalist needs to solve another case. Is it a sign that there will be another season?
The Snow Girl Ending Explained: The Beginning of Everything?
Before we understand the ending, we need to contextualize the beginning of the miniseries. As mentioned above, it begins with little Amaya disappearing into the crowd at the traditional Spanish festival. Ana and Álvaro, who are her parents, are looking for her tirelessly, but their efforts are not successful. That’s where our heroine Miren Rojo comes in, she is forced to deal with minor matters at Diario Sur but will convince her supervisor (Eduardo) to include her in the case of Amaya’s disappearance. So far, everyone is stunned by the lack of ransom demand. This detail particularly surprises Belén Millán, the police officer who is leading the investigation into the disappearance. After much investigation, the only clue she can find is the girl’s yellow jacket, which was found in a nearby apartment complex.
After Amaya’s disappearance, the investigation soon came to a suspect: a neighbor and family friend, David Luque. Although the man has an alibi for the night of the disappearance, Millán decides to search an apartment belonging to the Luque family and makes a shocking discovery. The police find several DVDs with child pornography and come to the conclusion that both David and his son (Samuel) are rapists – which will lead him to take his own life. The investigation remains without much news, while the long years pass without there being an answer for the family.
The year is 2016. Exactly six years after the girl’s disappearance, Miren receives a VCR tape with a message instructing her to share it with the missing girl’s parents. It is with this tape, which will be given by the journalist to the family, that Ana, Álvaro, Millán, and Miren discover that Amaya is still alive. The policewoman and the journalist trying to find out who recorded the tape, enlisting the help of a technology analyst. Based on the characteristics of the object, he will arrive at the name of James Foster, a man with a criminal record for sexually abusing a minor.
Despite being taken to the police station in custody, he is eventually released, as he also has an alibi for the night of the disappearance. It is because of him that the details of Miren’s past begin to be unearthed, as he reveals to the journalist that he is aware that she was raped. The man will say that the gruesome scenes were recorded and made available on Slide, a child pornography website. He will ask for no less than €10,000 from the young woman to give her the list of users and the name of the site’s administrator – which is essential for the journalist to find out who abused her.
Three more years later, in 2019, Miren receives a second tape with a text that can be translated as “Goodbye” which leaves Ana and Álvaro beyond worried, as they fear that the kidnappers will stop looking for them since they are the only link between them and their daughter. As she watches their pain, Miren ends up joining the dots by discovering the specific VCR model that was used to record the two tapes. It’s just that the quality of the second one is much better, even though they were recorded from the same device – which indicates that it was fixed. She decides to go through several repair shops for this type of device — which are quite rare, since they are vintage products and discovers that a woman named Iris Molina has repaired a device whose model matches the one used to record the tapes sent to her. Amaya’s family.
In a flashback in the final episodes, the series shows that Iris and her husband Santiago kidnapped Amaya during the parade. Earlier, the kidnapper had received the news from Ana who was her doctor at the time that she could not get pregnant. That was a really cold shower for her and her husband, who dreamed of having a child. Considering her life cursed by the news, she found Amaya separated from her parents on the day of the parade and the desire to be a mother took hold in her conscience – which resulted in her kidnapping. She decided to raise the little one as her daughter to fulfill her wish, being supported by her husband.
Amaya, in turn, insisted at first that Iris was not her mother, but ended up accepting her new reality over time, starting to be called “Júlia”. Living in isolation with her new parents, the young woman was mentally transformed and convinced that the world around her is full of bad men. That’s why Iris’s secret was kept for a long time since whenever someone visited the couple, the girl would run to the room in fear of the supposed bad men. All this fear and panic nurtured by Iris in the little girl caused her to end up completely killing the memory of her real parents. The couple did not kidnap the girl to harm her biological parents, but to fulfill the dream of fatherhood even if it was wrong. They also never wanted any kind of money, and the tapes sent to Ana and Álvaro were to inform them that the girl is alive and safe, so that this would ease the couple’s pain.
This secret, although it lasted for nine long years, comes to an end because of Iris’ carelessness when repairing her VCR. That’s what leads Miren to her house in search of Amaya, who now lives only with the kidnapper since Santiago has passed away. This made the woman even more emotionally dependent on her daughter. For this reason, she tries to run away from home with the girl, but when she realizes that there is no way out, she decides to attack her own life and Amaya’s by driving her van up a hill. She dies, but the girl survives and is immediately taken to a care center and hospitalized for a while.
Ana and Álvaro are informed of what happened and Millán tells them that Amaya’s fingerprints match those of “Júlia”, guaranteeing that she is their daughter. They get the (now teenage) girl back, but not the way they raised her, as she doesn’t remember anything about her past. When Ana and Álvaro arrive at the service center, Amaya not only doesn’t recognize them but also doesn’t respond by their baptismal name only by Júlia. The two realize the great emotional damage caused to the girl’s mind and conclude that it will be very difficult to undo the daughter’s paranoid beliefs and learnings. They may even try to do it with the help of mental health professionals, but the process can be overwhelming. This opens the possibility for Ana and Álvaro to accept Amaya as Júlia and start a whole new story, without clinging to the past after all, maybe they didn’t even expect to find her after so many years.
The Death of James Foster and David Luque?
Two characters that we have already mentioned, previously suspected of the crime against Amaya, end up having a greater relationship with Miren’s past. As the investigation into the girl progresses, Millán discovers that the two were killed and burned – and Mien becomes the main suspect in the murder case after a photo of her is found at the scene of the fire. Although she has been unable to find the people who raped her in the past, she has come to see the two criminals as the biggest threats, as they have destroyed the lives of many with the Slide. The pornographic site was owned by Luque, which was the name that Foster hid from the journalist and asked for money in exchange for revealing it.
It is not clear if it was Miren who killed the two, but she likely decided to end their lives to ensure that they no longer threaten the lives of any other girls — as hers was threatened in the past and exposed precisely in the past. A website that Luque created. However, as Millán was unable to find evidence to prove that Miren was guilty of the crime against the rapists, the journalist remains at large.
A Hook For a Sequel?
With the discovery of Amaya’s whereabouts, Miren gains fame, and her life changes overnight, which makes her become a well-known author with a name revered by journalists in the region. It also arouses the fury of people involved in child abduction, who certainly don’t want her around. One day, she receives a photograph of a girl tied up in an anonymous package. Next to the photo, the name “Laura Valdivia” indicates that it is a girl named Laura who was the victim of kidnapping. Another indication is that the person behind sending the photo is precisely the kidnapper. This opens up a hook for a continuation of the story, which could show Miren’s saga in search of Laura in the following seasons – while a powerful kidnapper will do everything to challenge her on this mission.
