Ross Lynch is an unnerving Dahmer, sexually frustrated and awkwardly leering, with disconcertingly dead eyes. His home-life doesn’t help: he and his family live in a cabin in the woods, his loveless parents constantly bickering, and he soon begins acting up to get attention, notably faking seizures for laughs. After kicking off with some exposition - within two minutes Dahmer has ogled both a bit of roadkill and a young jogger, and his dad soon tells him he needs to be doing more ‘normal’ things than playing around with dead animals in the shed - it becomes a portrait of a young man fond of animal dismemberment, yes, but also burdened by repressed emotions and barely there social skills. It is resolutely ungrisly - 2002’s so-so Jeremy Renner biopic Dahmer explored all the cruising and killing, and this is a more analytical origin story. Set in smalltown Ohio during the months leading up to Dahmer’s first kill, writer-director Marc Meyers’ adaptation is a quiet study of dysfunction.
After hearing of his very public conviction, ex-schoolmate John ‘Derf’ Backderf was suitably shocked, later writing and illustrating a graphic novel about the time they’d spent together in the ’70s: a nuanced portrait of a monster in waiting.
Jeffrey Dahmer drugged, raped and killed 17 men between 19, often indulging in necrophilia and cannibalism along the way.
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