Does your movie need to generate suspense for 80 minutes? Well, there's an easy solution: just put some children in danger. That's the takeaway from Emelie, a well-crafted, but ultimately hollow, indie thriller in which a deranged babysitter terrorizes her charges. Its scares are effective, sure, but also pretty cheap: How can we not squirm when a young woman shows three kids homemade porn of their parents and lets a toddler handle a revolver? When a film deals with subject matter this loaded, there's a burden on it to actually say something or risk just looking shameless; unfortunately, Emelie doesn't have much to offer beyond obvious button-pushing. That's frustrating, because in some respects this is a lean, mean shark of a movie. The opening shows a young woman named Maggie being kidnapped; we soon learn that she's the regular babysitter for the Thompson family, whose parents are eager to get away for the night for their anniversary dinner. Thankfully, Maggie's friend "Anna" (Sarah Bolger) is able to look after the kids on such short notice, and she seems pleasant enough at first. Mom (Susan Pourfar) and dad (Chris Beetem) think she's responsible, while the youngsters -- eldest Jacob (Joshua Rush), middle child Sally (Carly Adams), and toddler Christopher (Thomas Bair) -- are excited by the fact that she's much more permissive than Maggie. All of this setup is handled quickly and efficiently, and the film even finds a clever, creepy way to explain its villain's motivations: She tells the kids a bedtime story about the traumatic event that caused her psyche to snap. But that reveal also means that Emelie (Anna's real name, which Jacob discovers when he sneaks a peak at her driver's license) is simply a madwoman with no reason to jeopardize these people aside from pure insanity. That's a shame: There are signs early on that there's something rotten in the Thompson family, and that perhaps Emelie is there to expose their past misdeeds or seek revenge on them. Yet nothing ever comes from the hints that the father might have a wandering eye, or that middle schooler Jacob already has a porn addiction. The filmmakers didn't need to follow through on these ideas, of course, but without them, Emelie becomes just the story of a bland, anonymous middle-class family fighting off an interloper whose personality boils down to "crazy!" (One big example of how this lack of nuance hurts the movie: We keep cutting back to the parents' anniversary dinner, expecting that their conversation will yield clues about Emelie's true nature or plan. However, all they ever talk about are banalities concerning their relationship and parenting.) Credit where credit is due: Bolger is convincingly unhinged, the child actors are believable, and director Michael Thelin is able to deliver real tension on a miniscule budget. But in the end, there's nothing here to elevate this above being a solid genre exercise. It's a weird thing to say about a movie focused on child endangerment, but Emelie plays it safe.
