Starring Édouard Tremblay-Grenier. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

The horrors in this stunning feature from Philippe Lesage are mostly implicit, largely being pulled from the air around Félix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), a 10-year-old who’s haunted, like any sensitive kid, by his dawning apprehension of a world that’s much less secure than he thought.

We’re in a deceptively sun-drenched Montreal suburb, probably in the late ’80s—although period is a slippery dimension here, like an unreliable memory—and there are rumours of kidnappings in the air. Lesage’s camera glides inquisitively through this ordinary if uncertain world, usually with a hint of something sinister just out of frame, as if Robert Altman had attempted a Québécois rehash of It Follows.

The filmmaker has plainly stated that he drew on his own experiences for The Demons, which is frank about Félix’s emerging, angst-filled sexuality in ways that most films would prefer to avoid. The boy is dimly aware of the attention paid to his restless father by a friend’s mom, a pneumatic divorcée who happens to do her housekeeping in the nude. The spectre of AIDS compounds Félix’s anxiety following his own confused and faintly cruel experiments with another boy.

Here and elsewhere, particularly in crucial sequences set at a public pool, Lesage lets his gaze rest on the film’s array of tiny, vulnerable bodies, splitting the difference between the film’s twin poles of nostalgia and menace. It’s a pre-Internet time of “stranger danger” that eventually turns all too real. Even then, this perfectly paced Remembrance of Things Ghastly blind-sides you with two minutes of pure joy during a spontaneous bedroom dance party (set to Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata”). Some demons are real, others imagined, but Lesage is too honest to ignore the shafts of light that still pierce the phantasmagoric fun house of childhood.