My Friend Dahmer (15) ★★★★

IT’S something of an uphill struggle to tell the story of one of the 20th century’s most heinous serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer (played here by Ross Lynch), in his formative years. Are we meant to empathise with him or simply observe and recoil in quiet horror over what he’s becoming?

It’s a difficult task that writer-director Marc Meyers pulls off neatly with what is an intimate and consistently uneasy depiction of the years that led up to the real-life subject’s rape and murder of 17 young men between 1978 and 1991.

Set in Ohio in the short time leading up to Dahmer’s first murder, Meyers’s film is a surprisingly deliberately-paced and convincing portrait of his dysfunction in many forms: Dahmer’s home life with his loveless, constantly bickering parents (Anne Heche and Dallas Roberts) and his awkward interactions at school compounded by a sense of emotional repression and what appear to be primal needs that manifest themselves in animal torture and experimentation in the garden shed.

The title refers to the perspective of John “Derf” Backderf (Alex Wolff), a fellow student and eventual friend of Dahmer’s who wrote the graphic novel upon which the film is based. But the name could also mean us as viewers, growing ever more involved in the story of this young man and observing the tell-tale signs that, if acted upon by someone in his life, might have prevented his future hideous actions.

While the behavioural and psychological traits of the real Dahmer are believably and authentically depicted – namely the obsession with killing animals and his increasingly attention-seeking actions in the classroom – there is a certain sense that, as a piece of cinematic drama, it too plainly and simply telegraphs what he would later become.

Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing prospect that the film ponders and lingers over throughout, engaging with the idea of whether something could have been done to stop him or whether it was all inevitable. It is, for the most part, a coldly detached dramatic retelling that avoids sliding into sensationalism by exploiting or revelling in the formation of depravity.

Its more isolated approach is embodied and feeds into in Lynch’s central performance. In an infinitely darker role that will surprise anyone who knows him from his Disney Channel years, he sidesteps caricature for something more inward and insidiously unnerving, perfectly conveying the sense of repressed awkwardness often simply with a leering look or turn of phrase.

We are presented with Dahmer the person, not merely the bogeyman, and that makes it all the more unsettling.