![]() He deftly demonstrates that Jeff is trapped. What comes through is a riveting study in silent suffering, colored with empathy but ultimately horrifying to behold. Instead the brilliant subtlety of his depiction masks the knotted and tense psychopathy that is ferociously blossoming inside him. His painful closeted homosexuality and rapidly deteriorating mental state never seem one note or contrived. His portrayal of Jeff never devolves into camp or turgidity, the way many other serial killer biopics have. Meyers apparently wanted to dial up the cringe factor to the point where it became downright sinister, and he definitely succeeds.Įven the most innocuous moments carry with them an ever present sense of dread, which is a credit to the understated but effective performance of Ross Lynch as Dahmer. And I guess that's an attribute when all is said and done. All of his actions are imbued with a devastating sense of foreboding that I personally found to be borderline unbearable at times. In fact, the movie's strength is basically drawn from not what it actually depicts, but the knowledge the viewer has of what Dahmer would become. ![]() It chronicles his brief but impactful acquaintance with John Backderf (the creator of the graphic novel) and his friends, who hung out together and goofed around in ways that were certainly odd, but not beyond the pale when it came to the behavioral tendencies of cringey teenage boys in the late 1970's. My Friend Dahmer, directed by Marc Meyers and based off of the 2002 graphic novel of the same name, follows infamous sex killer Jeffrey Dahmer's formative years (specifically his time as a senior in high school) where he essentially passed the point of no return as far as his proclivity for deranged and sadistic sexual violence was concerned. Now yes serial killer biopics aren't new, and there certainly are older movies that fit this critieria (the cult classics Willard and Martin come to mind), but it seems like this kind of "square peg + round hole = bloodshed" material has been picking up steam in these recent years.* ![]() This lessens the film’s impact some, but probably makes it more watchable getting too close to all that seething, violent pathology might be too much bear.I don't know if "cringe horror" is a term, but along with Split and Creep it seems like we're witnessing the emergence of a burgeoning genre comprised of films centered around deeply flawed, awkward, and dangerous characters. And Dahmer’s particular sexual fixations-which, in large part, were the motives for his murders-are only alluded to and hinted at. We see him drinking, but perhaps not the full extent of the alcoholism that gripped him for most of his adolescence and adulthood. ![]() In adapting the graphic novel by John “Derf” Backderf, based on his own experiences as a sorta-friend of Dahmer’s in late high school, Meyers softens some of the grim aspects of Dahmer’s life. But it does extend him some human compassion, letting us see how the tragedy of his loneliness, spurred by the horror of his dark compulsions, made pre-murderous Dahmer something of a victim himself. My Friend Dahmer doesn’t present some rueful wish that, oh, young Jeffrey might have made it if only someone had reached out to him. But the film is still an interesting depiction of how someone like that might function in our relatively normal world, just before he begins killing people and is thus lost to an unfathomable life of secrets. Well, maybe it doesn’t hop into Dahmer’s mind so much as distressingly bounce off of it, opaque and unknowably alien as a sociopath’s psychology can be. My Friend Dahmer, from writer-director Marc Meyers, is an eerie and effective portrait of serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer in his beyond-troubled teen years, a quick hop into the mind of a loner kid who was about to become a monster. If Netflix’s compelling F.B.I.-profiling drama Mindhunter wasn’t enough to satisfy your serial-killer appetite-or, indeed, if it stoked it-there’s a movie being released November 3 that might do the trick.
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