My Friend Dahmer

Coming-of-age biopic My Friend Dahmer will get under your skin. Its subject is a teenage Jeffrey Dahmer, who will go on to rape and murder 17 young men, and in some cases cannibalise them. What makes the films so troubling isn’t the grisly violence of your typical serial killer flick – there are no murders, with the film ending just as Dahmer picks up his first victim in 1978 – but the compassion and humanity director Marc Meyers shows towards his disturbed protagonist.

Based on the graphic memoir by Derf Backderf, who went to high school with the boy who would become known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, it follows a morose Dahmer over the course of his final year of high school in the late 70s. The picture’s greatest asset is its star Ross Lynch. The former Disney kid plays Dahmer as a lost soul uncomfortable in the world around him. Lynch keeps his body frigid and shoulders hunched, with his pained face hidden behind huge aviator glasses and a curtain of blonde hair, as he bumbles through adolescence with no adults looking out for him or friends to confide in.

Myers’ framing adds to this feeling of isolation, with Dahmer usually positioned awkwardly off to the side or lurking in the background. But just as you find yourself feeling sorry for this lonely teen misfit, Lynch will do or say something so off your guts will twist. You might find yourself feeling an uneasy sympathy towards this future killer, but Lynch makes him too strange to be likable.

Also disturbing is the film’s coal black sense of humour. When Dahmer’s self-obsessed and clearly mentally ill mother (Anne Heche) serves up some insufficiently cooked chicken, she demands that her brood chow down anyway. “We eat our mistakes in this family,” she exclaims. It’s just one of a number of gastly moments of foreshadowing that manage to be sick and funny all at once. Dropping in Easter eggs to Dahmer’s future crimes is certainly in poor taste, but their inclusion have a welcoming distancing effect, allowing you a moment to snap out of this claustrophobic and deeply sad portrait of a serial killer as a young man.

Dahmer’s disturbing hobbies include dissolving roadkill in acid and stalking a hunky doctor who jogs near his home, but the strange behaviour that gets him noticed around the school halls is a crass “comedy” routine he develops where he pretends to have palsy. Kids being a cruel breed, particularly in the unenlightened 1970s, Dahmer’s un-PC shtick endears him to his classmates, specifically three geeky bros who take him under their wing, including a Backderf stand-in played by Alex Wolff.

The result is that Dahmer becomes an unlikely cult hero late in his final year of school, but his psychopathy is clearly too far gone by this point. Rather than redeeming him, being around people only adds to his loneliness as it becomes clear how far removed he is from his peers. It’s easy to imagine serial killers as Hannibal Lecter-style monsters, but remembering that they’re real people living banal and sad lives is all the more terrifying.

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Released by Altitude