“Sometimes it’s okay to destroy something for fun.”
Emelie, like its title character, is a nasty, insidious thing. At its best, Michael Thelin’s film is unsettling and deeply uncomfortable, producing the kinds of chills that you feel burrow under your skin and latch on to your nerves. For most of its runtime, Emelie is one of my favorite types of horror movies, the kind that could conceivably work as a stage play (much like Funny Games, which this film is clearly inspired by). The film isn’t successful all the time, but man, when it works, it really works.
Dan and Joyce Thompson have been married for thirteen years. Today is their anniversary, and they need a new sitter for their three kids, Jacob, Sally, and Christopher. They decide on a woman named Anna, a friend of their usual sitter. Dan goes to pick her up, but we know this isn’t Anna. We know what happened to Anna: she was beaten and stuffed into a trunk in the film’s first scene. This is someone new entirely, someone wiping blood off of her shoe while Dan pulls into her driveway. This is Emelie.
Alfred Hitchcock once described the difference between suspense and surprise: two people are sitting at a table and a bomb detonates. If we don’t know the bomb is there, it’s surprise. If we do know, it’s suspense. In Emelie we know the bomb is under the table. The drive is fraught because of what we know, and because of what we don’t – to wit, we don’t know exactly what Emelie wants. Which makes her dangerous. Sarah Bolger is terrific in the title role, conveying a kind of playful malice with her eyes that is unnerving and entrancing.
The first half of Emelie is by far its most effective. Once Dan and Joyce leave, she is firmly in control, and everything about Bolger’s performance reinforces this. There is never a moment when we doubt that Emelie knows what she’s doing. She begins exerting control in small ways, first by giving the oldest child, Jacob, a toy that his mother had confiscated. It escalates from there; Emelie steals Joyce’s bracelet, she feeds Sally’s hamster to Jacob’s python, she sits the kids down for “movie night,” which here means showing the kids a homemade sex tape of their parents.
The reason this first half of the film works so well is that it engenders a feeling of unease to the point that you start to think that literally anything might happen. Emelie isn’t as horrific as it is dreadful, and Bolger’s performance does little to belie Emelie’s true intentions. If the film had stayed in this gear, it would be a low-key triumph of creeping dread. But it takes a more conventional approach to its back half, and while it’s not enough to completely derail the movie, it does work to its detriment.
The thing is, I don’t want to know why Emelie is impersonating Anna, or why she’s terrorizing and traumatizing these kids. The unknowable is always scarier than the known, and while this isn’t the place to pitch how I would make a movie, if Emelie hadn’t revealed its characters’ intentions, it could be a wonderful piece of nihilistic horror. As it is, though, Emelie is still solid, largely thanks to Bolger’s go-for-broke performance. (Although Joshua Rush is certainly no slouch as Jacob.) Why she isn’t a bigger star now is beyond me.
I’m not going to reveal the ending, not because there’s some massive twist (although there is a genuine holy-shit moment), but because it’s not enough to derail Emelie entirely. It’s not even bad, strictly speaking, it just feels like it belongs to a different film. In the end, Emelie is effective without necessarily bringing anything new to the genre – with the exception, that is, of Sarah Bolger.
Thursday, 10/1: Phantasm
Friday, 10/2: Frozen
Saturday, 10/3: Suspiria
Sunday, 10/4: Suspiria (2018)
Monday, 10/5: Emelie
Tuesday, 10/6: Castle Freak
Wednesday, 10/7: Session 9
Thursday, 10/8: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Friday, 10/9: We Are Still Here
Saturday, 10/10: The Changeling
Sunday, 10/11: The Bad Seed
Monday, 10/12: Verotika
Tuesday, 10/13: The Legend of Hell House
Wednesday, 10/14: Lake Mungo
Thursday, 10/15: Puppetmaster
Friday, 10/16: Marrowbone
Saturday, 10/17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Sunday, 10/18: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Monday, 10/19: Sweetheart
Tuesday, 10/20: Girl On the Third Floor
Wednesday, 10/21: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Thursday, 10/22: Triangle
Friday, 10/23: Dog Soldiers
Saturday, 10/24: Noroi: The Curse
Sunday, 10/25: Train to Busan
Monday, 10/26: Tales From the Hood
Tuesday, 10/27: Mandy
Wednesday, 10/28: Sometimes They Come Back
Thursday, 10/29: Veronica
Friday, 10/30: The Wicker Man
Saturday, 10/31: Child’s Play
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