Film
My Friend Dahmer
- Director
- Marc Meyers
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 105 mins
Imagine being able to boast that you’re a former chum of a chap who went on to become one of the world’s most notorious serial killers. John ‘Derf’ Backderf was a teenage pal of the young Jeffrey Dahmer back in the late ’70s. He later turned his experiences into a ‘graphic memoir’, which has in turn been adapted for the screen by writer/director Marc Meyers.
Played, amusingly, by squeaky-clean pop singer and former Disney Channel star Ross Lynch, the teen Jeff is an awkward loner with a troubled home life who collects roadkill and becomes homoerotically obsessed with a male jogger (Vincent Kartheiser, of Mad Men fame) as he embarks on his journey towards, y’know, rape, necrophilia and cannibalism. At school, aspiring artist Derf (Alex Wolff) and his chums inauguarate the Dahmer Fan Club and place him at the centre of their pranks. The film avoids most of those familiar ‘making of a monster’ cliches as it walks the line between black comedy and empathy.
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