Metacritic reviews

For much of its brisk eighty-two minutes running time, Emelie (2015) is a devilishly good thriller of notably transgressive bent, giving the slasher and home invasion formats a rare matriarchal focus.

Emelie does create a menacing atmosphere and provide an interesting response to the "Final Girl" model that has long been the horror standard.

Irish actress Bolger plays her psychopath with cool, calculating intimidation, while first-time feature director Michael Thelin, sharing screenplay credit with Rich Herbeck, lays a solid foundation of suburban domesticity on which to build all the mounting menace.

This potentially lurid material is lent considerable ballast and believability by the excellent work of its trio of child actors.

The rest of Emelie doesn’t live up to its peaks, through no fault of star Sarah Bolger, who makes a memorable villain.

The film begins by telegraphing impending doom (and wraps up, underwhelmingly, with thriller clichés).

A tidy and nasty and often effective thriller that doesn’t quite blossom into full horror.

Delivering some genuinely creepy slow-burn moments before devolving into baroque excess, Emelie delivers a nasty twist on an all-too-common scenario.

Working from Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck’s script, Mr. Thelin plays with genre clichés without upending them, and the results are more creepy than scary.

Those scenes do allow star Sarah Bolger to showcase her range as a babysitter gradually transforming from sweet to sinister.