Paranoid Park is a modest thriller but it plays unusual and unsettling games with perception and time. You would expect nothing less from Gus Van Sant, whose trippy, award-winning experiments, notably Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005), feed directly into this. Alex is a high-school skateboarding nut in Portland, Oregon. He’s composing a journal about his trip to Paranoid Park, a concrete basin built and squatted by skateboarders and local drug addicts. He hooks up with an older youth. They decide to do a little train-hopping in a nearby goods yard. They are chased by a security guard. Alex hits him with his board. The guard trips, falls under a freight train going in the opposite direction and is severed in half at the waist.

Alex’s inability to compute this truly grisly scene fuels the entire film. Clues that all is not right in Alex’s world are hard to detect. The first-time actor, Gabe Nevins, is a perfect blank.

Who can tell what on earth is going on behind those clear brown eyes? Certainly not Detective Lu (Daniel Liu), who can squeeze nothing out of the boy.

“I’m writing this a little out of order,” Alex scrawls in his notebook. The genius of Van Sant’s film is that it’s almost impossible to work out where we are at any one time in relation to the accident. The journal is of little help. The patchwork scenes of Alex at school, or skating – exquisitely shot by Chris Doyle and wittily underscored by a grungy soundtrack – are arranged in a way that makes you wonder just how innocent or sane this inscrutable hero is.

15, 85mins

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