My Friend Dahmer review: A feature character study of teenager Jeffrey Dahmer, a boy who grows into one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th Century.
My Friend Dahmer review by Andrew Gaudion.
It’s a setup we’ve all seen before; a film focusing on a senior year in high school, going through all the trials and tribulations of the final few months in which characters aim to define their high school experience and try to establish a sense of who they are. Even a 70’s setting isn’t that unique for a coming of age high school drama. But what is unique about this high school drama is that the weirdo in class isn’t just someone who gets left behind as an obscure high school memory, he is someone who goes down in infamy, as the focus of My Friend Dahmer is none other than a teenager Jeffrey Dahmer, a boy who grows into one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th Century.
My Friend Dahmer has a unique pedigree to it, one which makes it even more fascinating beyond its focus on Dahmer. The film itself is based on a graphic novel by Derf Backderf, who was in Dahmer’s year at high school and who features prominently within the film itself (played by Alex Woolf). So, what we have here is an account of Dahmer from someone who probably would’ve been content to leaving Dahmer as an odd story from his past, but fate played a very different hand, leading to Backderf (and, undoubtedly, everyone else who went to high school with Dahmer), to question what role they could have played in the creation of the ‘Milwaukee Monster.’
Backderf’s own position is a complex one, and the film may have been a little more interesting if told entirely from his perspective, as he and a group of friends encourage a class clown-type of behaviour in Dahmer, one which involved him ‘spazzing out’ in public spaces to illicit laughs and gasps of shock from an unsuspecting audience. In perpetuating a type of behaviour that enforces a stereotype of Dahmer being a class freak, both Backderf and his friends (and, as a consequence, us) are led to question whether or not what they’re doing is cruel and whether or not that are contributing negatively to Dahmer’s high school experience, despite the fact that they deem him to be a friend.
The rest of the film never quite allows for this train of thought to occur so subtly elsewhere as we come to focus more on Dahmer himself, his home life and what his obsessions are. His family life is very much sign-posted as the main reason for his dysfunctional behaviour, living in a household with his parents who clearly hate each other and a little brother who gets much more attention. Couple this with a fascination in dead animals that progresses from a fixation in roadkill to Dahmer doing the actual killing himself and a growing obsession with a jogger who goes by hims house, you end up with a lot of obvious touch stones in regards to how this behaviour impacted on his actions later in life.
Ross Lynch as Dahmer is exceptional casting. The young actor, who is predominantly known for roles in various shows on the Disney Channel, revels the chance to play against type, and does a great deal to humanise Jeffrey’s adolescent struggle, from the more relatable anxieties (attempting to make friends, sexual confusion) to the more sinister and macabre. He creates a lot of empathy, which only makes this particular story all the more disturbing.
My Friend Dahmer may perpetuate a sense of myth-making that often occurs with figures like Dahmer, ones who do act on their darker impulses to extreme degrees. While some may complain about such perpetuation, there is no denying that there is a hunger to explore these kind of stories, to try and unlock the mysteries of what would drive an individual from a seemingly normal background to commit such horrific acts. Stories like this are made because there is a desire for a lot of audiences to try and understand what we find disturbing; it is only natural to want to explore the unnatural. My Friend Dahmer, while maybe not as subtle as it could’ve been, does offer a indisputably curious account of the young man that came before the monster, led by Lynch’s immensely watchable performance, more than feeding our own curiosity.
My Friend Dahmer review by Andrew Gaudion, May 2018.
My Friend Dahmer is released in UK cinemas on Friday 1st June 2018.
