Horror movie that makes you question how far you would go for your family or at least your kids (if you got ‘em). Rob Lowe is our Scream King in this and I think he does an excellent job of being a concerned father but also a concerned person existing in the world his daughter is creating. McKenna Grace does a great job being a creepy kid too.
⭐⭐⭐.5
Trigger Warning Child Death
We start out swinging with little Emma watching a cat drown. Yikes a million. This kid really is a Bad Seed. We meet papa Rob Lowe who is totally not in tune with his creepy daughter but that will come to a head later, I’m sure. Emma is obsessed with success and will do whatever she needs to do to get it, like pushing a kid off of a cliff. Yeah, really. She thinks she was all slick about it but there is no such thing as a perfect murder. There is also a line in there about how Emma thinks that drowning doesn’t hurt because her dad told her that and it’s like, no man, that is not true at all, I’m pretty sure drowning hurts a lot. (YIKES) Anyway, they get a sketchy babysitter who is right away onto Emma but Emma catches Chloe stealing so Emma has blackmail over her. It isn’t until Chloe finds the metal of the dead boy in Emma’s room that the power flips and papa Rob Lowe is informed and he starts to ask some serious questions about why his kid has this metal.
Emma claims that she won it from the dead child before he died. They return the metal to his parents and find out her teacher died then Emma feels free as a bird which is very alarming to papa Rob Lowe. For Emma and her short-sighted child brain, her problems are over, but her rash actions are going to lead to her getting caught. Papa Rob Lowe will totally notice that the wasp nest from the garage is missing and find it strange that that’s how the teacher died. He totally notices but does/says nothing about the missing wasps nest. The relationship between Emma and Chloe reminds me a lot of The Babysitter, but more hateful of course. Yeah, very hateful as Emma sets Chloe on literal fire. Liar, liar, pants and whole body on fire, I guess. If I were Chloe I would have expressed that if Emma killed me too that people would catch her. But nope, Emma is just pretending the sitter was smoking in the garage. Papa Rob Lowe finally connects the dots of death all around Emma and confronts her later that night.
I felt some kind of way when papa Rob Lowe finally raises his voice against the killer kid (something akin to the vapors). He gets her to admit to everything, she has even killed before (her first nanny). The police need to ask questions but papa Rob Lowe isn’t sure what to do at this point. This isn’t a malevolent spirit or paranormal entity, this is just his cold-hearted daughter killing folks. What is he supposed to do about the fact that his kid is so rotten to the core? Well after Emma attempts to kill him, killing them both is his idea, but of course she switches the drugged cocoa for the regular one. He should have pulled a Princess Bride and poisoned them both. He intended for them both to die anyway. Ugh. Either way we get to the end and papa Rob Lowe isn’t strong enough to pull the trigger on his own little girl and he gets shot in the process so he is dead and the only one who knows about Emma’s crazy crimes is the Aunt she is going to go live with but of course the Aunt doesn’t believe a nine (9) year old did any of that dark shit so it is all going to happen again.
