In reorienting his film around Jeffrey’s tortured psyche, Meyers’s screenplay ends up stuck in an awkward mode of empathy, trying to paint Dahmer as a typically fucked-up teenager just as it illuminates an exceptionally disturbed criminal mind.

Portrayed in the film by Alex Wolff, Derf befriended Jeffrey for a few months in high school, and his book interrogates his own possible role in Dahmer’s trajectory toward becoming a serial killer. My Friend Dahmer is based on a comic book project by John “Derf” Backderf that first started in 1994 that later grew into an acclaimed graphic novel. The only surprise in the film’s early scenes is that the omnipresent bullies at his Ohio high school don’t seem to notice that he exists. Jeffrey shuffles through scenes with a vacant countenance and an exaggerated, vampiric hunch. Within the first few minutes of the film, set in 1978, Jeffrey is shown leering at a local doctor (Vincent Kartheiser) on his daily run, tinkering with animal carcasses in a shed in the woods, and despondent in a domestic life consumed by marital strife. Writer-director Marc Meyers’s prosaic coming-of-rage film My Friend Dahmer mostly neglects this advice, presenting Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) in his senior year of high school as a geyser of warning signs, a ticking time bomb of adolescent impotence and frustration. There’s no single “why” that creates a serial killer-only a “when.”

Their utility as research subjects further legitimizes their outsized sense of power, but Mindhunter always recognizes the limitations of their performances: No amount of information or speculation can predict a serial killer before one exists. In contrast to Hannibal Lecter, plainly framed as both villain and genius when first introduced in The Silence of the Lambs, the murderers in Mindhunter are offered charisma but no sympathy the series is plain in its disdain for these men but frank about the celebrity they’ve attained. One of the neat tricks of Netflix’s Mindhunter is how it recasts the reverence with which Hollywood productions treat serial killers.

My friend dahmer movie october