In short: Emelie (2015)

Watch out bourgeoisie, those fiendish lower classes, in this case in form of a mentally ill babysitter (Sarah Bolger), are out to steal your children again (instead of doing the decent thing and sacrificing them to trees)!

Little do innocent whatshisface and whatshername know that their new babysitter isn’t the new babysitter they thought she was. So, while they have a somewhat frayed wedding anniversary dinner, said babysitter is trying to steal their youngest kid. Though not without first playing mind games with all three of the children, because otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a movie here.

While there’s not much wrong with Michael Thelin’s thriller beyond subtextual politics I’m rather sure the film just didn’t put any thought in, there’s also very little that’s right with it apart from basic visual competence and decent acting. The script goes from the obvious to the all too well-worn and isn’t even terribly good at milking that emotionally cheapest of all thriller set-ups, threatened children. Which might have something to do with the fact the film is always circling around the truly nasty things or any actual abysses and prefers the most well-trodden paths. In part, I find it even somewhat commendable the film is staying a bit too classy to show too bad things happening to children, yet this also means it doesn’t demonstrate much of a personality of its own, and never does much that’d actually hit its audience hard in any way. I have indeed seen quite a few Lifetime movies that were quite a bit more daring than this one is, and those films do at least have reasons for not touching on certain things. It’s all just a bit tepid, really, and tepidness isn’t exactly the thing I want from my thrillers.