Summary:
This portrait of an adolescent Dahmer constitutes an interesting background to the Ryan Murphy series, with some similar events and points in common in their treatment. A subtitled version is available on YouTube.
Review:
Marc Myers' film is based on the homonymous graphic novel by John "Derf" Backderf, a former high school classmate of future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (and an important character in the film), and portrays the young man's life in the last year of "high school". School" in Milwaukee.
I watched this 2017 movie right after the end of Ryan Murphy's magnificent series. So it was a totally influenced experience, one could say "contaminated", where comparisons between the two are inevitable.
Some of the elements developed by the series appear in this interesting film. Dahmer is a repressed homosexual geek who is already pursuing his taxidermic passion and is bullied at school. But the film shows how, somehow, he reconverts his relationship with his oppressors (who still are, including the author of the novel) to be accepted by that group and the school community in general. His conflictive family environment and his relationship with his parents are also very well described (the role of his mother is played by an unrecognizable Anne Heche). The story (which unfolds linearly) develops very well the crescendo of the disturbances of its young protagonist and wisely ends the narrative at the precise point, in a story that holds several moments of ominous tension.
I have no doubt that Murphy and Evan Peters watched this movie (and read the graphic novel), from which they probably took (albeit more subtly), for example, a certain body attitude of the protagonist (by a remarkable Ross Lynch) and some events.
This portrait of an adolescent Dahmer constitutes an interesting background to the Ryan Murphy series, with some similar events and points in common in their treatment. A subtitled version is available on YouTube.
Review:
Marc Myers' film is based on the homonymous graphic novel by John "Derf" Backderf, a former high school classmate of future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (and an important character in the film), and portrays the young man's life in the last year of "high school". School" in Milwaukee.
I watched this 2017 movie right after the end of Ryan Murphy's magnificent series. So it was a totally influenced experience, one could say "contaminated", where comparisons between the two are inevitable.
Some of the elements developed by the series appear in this interesting film. Dahmer is a repressed homosexual geek who is already pursuing his taxidermic passion and is bullied at school. But the film shows how, somehow, he reconverts his relationship with his oppressors (who still are, including the author of the novel) to be accepted by that group and the school community in general. His conflictive family environment and his relationship with his parents are also very well described (the role of his mother is played by an unrecognizable Anne Heche). The story (which unfolds linearly) develops very well the crescendo of the disturbances of its young protagonist and wisely ends the narrative at the precise point, in a story that holds several moments of ominous tension.
I have no doubt that Murphy and Evan Peters watched this movie (and read the graphic novel), from which they probably took (albeit more subtly), for example, a certain body attitude of the protagonist (by a remarkable Ross Lynch) and some events.