My Friend Dahmer

At first glance, Marc Mey­ers’ My Friend Dah­mer looks like anoth­er ser­i­al killer movie play­ing into our mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with these incom­pre­hen­si­ble fig­ures. Set dur­ing the months lead­ing up to noto­ri­ous killer Jef­frey Dahmer’s first mur­der, the film seems to promise an ​‘expla­na­tion’ for his actions.

Sure enough, Mey­ers faith­ful­ly repro­duces known details of Dahmer’s youth, in what can feel like lit­tle more than an adap­ta­tion of the ​‘ear­ly life’ sec­tion of his Wikipedia pro­file. Raised by a moth­er with men­tal health issues and a father who did the best he could, Dah­mer was unpop­u­lar at school, an awk­ward teen who chose to dis­sect road­kill rather than socialise with his classmates.

Things get more inter­est­ing when Dah­mer abrupt­ly finds him­self with three new friends, includ­ing the easy-going John Back­derf (played by the tran­scen­dent Alex Wolff), the boy who went on to write a graph­ic nov­el upon which the film is based. Far from pur­su­ing sor­did fame with juicy sto­ries about the killer’s youth, Backderf’s work is ani­mat­ed by a need to grap­ple with a nag­ging sense of remorse: did his treat­ment of Dah­mer con­tribute to his becom­ing a killer? Was there any­thing he could have done to stop him?

Dahmer’s new friends do not appear in a par­tic­u­lar­ly pos­i­tive light. Their inter­est in him does not stem from gen­uine con­cern or sym­pa­thy. Rather, the weirdo attracts their atten­tion when he sim­u­lates cere­bral pal­sy in class, a dis­turb­ing joke which the kids latch onto as a last rebel­lious prank before col­lege. They soon nick­name this type of class-time dis­rup­tion as ​‘doing a Dahmer.’

Fol­low­ing the boy, we are pow­er­less wit­ness­es to his frus­tra­tion when he ulti­mate­ly fails to get the sym­pa­thy he craves. His friends push the joke too far and then aban­don him, and Dahmer’s sense of alien­ation is a deeply relat­able exam­ple of ado­les­cent emo­tion. We’ve all felt how sad­ness can take on an exis­ten­tial dimen­sion in the sum­mer months, and when Jef­frey finds him­self home alone in the mid­dle of a warm after­noon while every­one else is prepar­ing for grad­u­a­tion with their fam­i­ly, it is dif­fi­cult not to feel his heartbreak.

But empa­thy has its lim­its. When Dah­mer decides to turn his resent­ment into vio­lence – and it is pre­sent­ed as a deci­sion, not an impulse – we can­not fol­low him there. The pain we felt for his hope­less­ness becomes the sor­row of know­ing that a kind word or ges­ture might have delayed his crimes, but not stopped them.

This pro­found sad­ness is the bedrock of a grow­ing sense of fear, which reach­es fever pitch inten­si­ty in an impres­sive­ly exe­cut­ed set piece near the end of the film. After not speak­ing to him for weeks, Back­derf offers Dah­mer a ride back to his house, one last encounter before he goes to col­lege and for­ev­er out of his friend’s life. Almost unbear­ably ter­ri­fy­ing, the con­fronta­tion restores to Dah­mer the stom­ach-churn­ing dread and mis­ery that read­ing about ser­i­al killers often induces, but watch­ing movies about them rarely does.

Although My Friend Dah­mer does not resolve the impos­si­ble ques­tion of ​‘nature vs nur­ture’, it approach­es it with a human­i­ty that is too often miss­ing from such stories.