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Ken Park
Drama, Thriller
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.
View on IMDbAppeals to viewers drawn to confrontational, transgressive portraits of troubled adolescence and domestic cruelty rather than comforting coming-of-age stories.
- Tone
- bleak, tense, melancholic
- Payoff
- heartbreak, reflection
- Pacing
- steady
- Intensity
- harrowing
- Structure
- episodic
- Themes
- alienation, family dysfunction, sexual repression, religious control, adolescent despair
- Setting
- contemporary, sun-bleached suburban California homes and skate parks