One day, the Thompson family decided to hire a young woman to be a babysitter. This woman seems strange because the oldest child of a child must protect his siblings from her when she discovers she is mentally disturbed.
Where it does fall back on formula, Emelie is sufficiently well made to hold viewer attention and it succeeds in maintaining a degree of creepiness throughout.
Herbeck's script pokes at the anxieties of parents who leave their kids alone with virtual strangers, while Bolger excels at playing the nightmare version of a babysitter: seemingly sweet, cool, and capable, but secretly evil.
Mr. Thelin plays with genre clichés without upending them, and the results are more creepy than scary, with shivers that are primarily generated by the sight of threatened children ...
In some cases, a slow build is a necessary and effective way to up the scare factor. In this case, the slow build is painstakingly sluggish, a seemingly never-ending climb toward a climax that's not satisfying enough to be worth the wait.
Not only could Emelie feasibly start a spate of similar psycho babysitter knock-offs if successful but it is also a great deal more interesting than most of its sub-genre predecessors.
