Meanwhile, his mother Joyce (Anne Heche) is a year out of one of many stints in a mental hospital, though writer/director Marc Meyers doesn’t take the simplistic approach that Jeffrey’s madness is hereditary. His father Lionel (Dallas Roberts) set up the shack as a place for his son to perform his “chemistry experiments,” though what Jeffrey gets up to is not what he had in mind. Jeffrey has a fascination with dead animals, and has a shack in the woods behind his Ohio home where he places remains he retrieves from local roads in jars of acid.
#MY FRIEND DAHMER MOVIE TIMES SERIAL#
My Friend Dahmer (which screened at the current Fantasia International Film Festival and goes into release in November) is a fascinating portrait of a burgeoning serial killer, and part of its tension derives from the fact that the warning signs we’re now aware of, after a few decades of media on the subject, seemed like little more than weird eccentricities back in 1978, when the movie is set. Jeffrey is far, but not too far, from his infamous murder spree when we’re first introduced to him.
That’s the film’s theme in a nutshell: Even the most notorious people in history had to start somewhere-they all had childhoods-and budding insanity can hide, undetected or misinterpreted, beneath a deceptive surface. The film isn’t an apology – it’s better than that: a window onto the making of a monster.My Friend Dahmer, among its many other qualities, has a great opening line: “Is this person famous? Would I know this person?” a Twenty Questions-playing teen asks a friend as the camera slowly tracks in to their classmate Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) sitting by himself on a school bus. Expertly, ‘My Friend Dahmer’ strikes a tricky tone of accuracy, empathy and warning it must, in order to stay on the right side of ethics. When Jeffrey’s chemist dad (Dallas Roberts) catches his boy in the backyard fooling around with acids, his fury is tinged with a loving parent’s disappointment.Īnd the spectacle of our antihero’s drunken, unhinged mother (Anne Heche) abandoning her fragile son in a long-telegraphed divorce should be familiar – and affecting – to anyone who watches non-cannibalism movies about broken homes. But even though Meyers sets his period-perfect indie before any of the abductions take place, he’s careful not to lean too heavily on moments a psychologist would stroke his beard at. ‘Do a Dahmer!’ they command of him, and he obliges your heart sinks when their interest wanes and their plaything is discarded.Īs a viewer, it’s weird to be put in the situation of feeling anything at all for so notorious a figure. Receiving his wish, he’s adopted as a dorky mascot of sorts by a pack of cool kids who like the way he ‘spazzes out’ in public places. Behind Dahmer’s clunky aviator glasses, Lynch’s eyes shine with the hope of communion with his peers. It’s anchored by a dangerously glum performance by 21-year-old Ross Lynch, who becomes more interesting the more you watch him. Writer-director Marc Meyers turns Backderf’s celebrated book into an absorbing, dramatised portrait of casual cruelty and teenage desperation, equal parts ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’. But graphic novelist Derf Backderf did go to high school with the future serial killer and ’70s teen loner Jeffrey Dahmer, who, back then, who was just another Midwestern kid with a fetish for dead animals. Okay, so maybe he’s not your best friend.
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