Critic Reviews

Pervert Park is eye-opening about the lives of convicted sex offenders, as inspired by a degree of empathy we need not be afraid of.

Pervert Park never demands forgiveness, only an attempt to understand and to maybe see where these dark impulses come from.

With a solid execution of storytelling, combined with a powerful statement about how we perceive sex offenders, Pervert Park excels as a documentary that explores not only what it takes to be human, but also why psychological evaluations could be crucial in understanding the forces that bring human to commit crimes in the first place.

Harrowing, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking, Pervert Park is an important film with an urgent, compassionate message.

This challenging but refreshingly candid nonfiction feature is the debut of the talented Swedish-Danish filmmaking couple Frida and Lasse Barkfors, who have not only found a fascinating subject but who also manage to build a case against isolating sex offenders without resorting to such facile shortcuts as voiceovers or heavy editorializing.

The documentary broadens well beyond a portrait of this particular facility to address the underlying causes of these crimes and to question how society might more constructively deal with the issues, where offering counseling to abuse victims becomes as important as, if not more so than, persecuting their abusers.

Pervert Park reveals a linked chain of incidents; we are all connected whether we admit it or not. What if we all lived in communities where the people around us agreed to help us get better, rather than blaming and shaming us for our transgressions?

There’s an appealing sense of cyclical healing in watching these people go about their daily rituals; in the end, however, Pervert Park feels like an incomplete portrait of this tight-knit community.

To be sure, nothing in this film is easy to hear. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be said, and learned from.