"The Diary of Adlar" is based on the memoir of Stephen Elliott. Franco plays the writer in the film, who records the trial process of a murder case, which happened in 2007 when Hans Reiser, a famous programmer and developer of the ReiserFS file system under the Linux operating system, murdered his wife. During the review process, Sean Sturgeon, a friend of Reiser and his wife's former lover, admitted that he had killed eight people, but Reiser's wife was not among them. This complicated murder case reminds people of the movie "The Shawshank Redemption".