Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
Ken Park is a provocateur's portrait of suburban teen dysfunction, structured around four loosely connected vignettes. The plotting is episodic and uneven — some threads (Claude's toxic home life, Tate's simmering psychosis) carry genuine dramatic weight, while others feel underdeveloped or deliberately sensationalist. Acting is inconsistent; the young cast delivers raw but frequently amateurish performances, which suits the naturalistic approach but undermines emotional credibility in key scenes. Cinematography by Edward Lachman has moments of clean, observational beauty consistent with his work, though the handheld intimacy sometimes tips into voyeurism for shock value. As a film, it shares Larry Clark's signature aesthetic and preoccupations too closely with Kids and Bully to feel truly distinctive — the suburban-teen-misery template is well-worn here. The ending, framing Ken Park's suicide as a bookend to this bleak mosaic, lands with a thud rather than resonance — the structure promises insight it never quite delivers, and the notorious final sequence courts controversy without earning catharsis.