“God is very far away; God can’t hear you scream.” This line from Argentinian director Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Si muero antes de despertar (US: If I Should Die Before I Wake) is even more chilling coming from a film about children, a film that opens with a child’s bedtime prayer and dreamy carousel with a voice-over warning that the monster of evil exists in every neighborhood. No wonder the students look like ghosts in their flowing white uniforms. Néstor Zavarce plays Lucho, the young son of a police inspector whose female classmates have begun to disappear after telling Lucho about a strange man who gives them treats, a man who soon appears to Lucho in a gorgeously produced nightmare. Despite his father’s protests and his expulsion from school, Lucho can’t just stand by while the “maniac” runs free, so he escapes from his bedroom one night to hunt for him: this extended sequence against the pitch black fairgrounds is as spine-tingling as any modern slasher movie, complete with the boy’s flashlight tracing two sets of footprints — one big, one small — while narrating what might have happened to the latest girl. The expressionistic camera work is delicious, but it’s the bleakness of this children-in-peril noir, a sort of updated, Latin American M (1931), that lands the strongest punch.