The Demons
Description
In a sunny, placid Montreal suburb in the late 1980s, before every child was attached to their parents by a cell phone, 10-year-old Félix (Edouard Tremblay-Grenier) grapples with the insecurities and confusion of impending adolescence. He harbors a crush on his teacher as a distraction from the uncomfortable sensation that everyone fits in perfectly at school except him. At home, Félix and his doting older siblings land in the middle of a scarily intense fight between their parents. Innocence is a fragile thing, easily dented and destroyed, and Félix surprises himself by inflicting cruelties on a younger boy. From the opening frames, documentary filmmaker Philippe Lesage infuses his exquisitely observed debut feature with an unsettling air of ambiguity and dread that portends greater crimes to follow. Nicolas Canniccioni’s calmly probing camera and Pye Corner Audio’s intense, judiciously placed score alert us to the incursion of an unseen danger into this pastel setting of swimming pools and playgrounds. The adults are caring but distracted, and their obliviousness—which extends to the end of the film, and presumably beyond—enables unexpected malevolent forces. The Demons evokes the close escapes and inevitable traumas that speckle the path to adulthood, culminating in a gentle entreaty to love your children well. —Michael Fox
Quebec native Philippe Lesage directed the 2012 Jutra Award-winner for Best Documentary, Ce cœur qui bat (The Heart That Beats), and three other docs before seguing to narrative features. The Demons was inspired by his own adolescence. “What Félix is experiencing as a child, it’s extremely close to my fears as a child,” Lesage told the Montreal Gazette. “Sometimes the reality is worse and sometimes the reality is not as bad. When I was a kid, I was sure I had AIDS. And I didn’t cry for an afternoon in my closet—I cried for four days.” As a filmmaker, Lesage rejects predictability. “I’m often bored as a viewer because of this conventional way of telling a story,” he says. “We always talk about this old Greek dramatic structure, and I think the narrative in fiction has not evolved that much. I realize what I like in film, it’s sometimes a scene that’s not necessary for the whole story or something that’s completely surprising. There’s something very polished in the way we tell stories now that I found quite boring. We try to remove everything that might be a little too risky.”
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/157228602?autoplay=1Film Details
Language French
Year 2015
Runtime 118
Country Canada
Director Philippe Lesage
Producer Galilé Marion-Gauvin, Philippe Lesage
Writer Philippe Lesage
Editor Mathieu Bouchard-Malo
Cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni
Music Pye Corner Audio
Cast Edouard Tremblay-Grenier, Pier-Luc Funk, Laurent Lucas, Pascale Bussières