A Filmmaker's Review: "My Friend Dahmer" (2017)

“My Friend Dahmer” (2017) is a film adapted from a graphic novel which I think we all passed around at school because we hoped this guy was a fictional character and we didn’t know he was real. Good grief he was real. And well, the graphic novel is quite dark and so, I was a little confused when I started watching this and I found that the film was trying to make me laugh along. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t laughing. Knowing who Dahmer is, I was just incredibly uncomfortable and stuck with a look of disgust on my face. Honestly, I didn’t think it was funny though the film clearly wanted me to think so. I felt my intelligence was slightly insulted and whilst the graphic novel didn’t really want to make you laugh as its main thing, the film relied on that way too much for me not to finish half a bottle of Russian Standard Vodka in the first act. Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of the film.

First of all, we’ll start of with something positive and that’s the performance of Ross Lynch as Jeffrey Dahmer. I think that he did a great job at making this isolated and estranged figure with a clear amount of problems. I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t him that was trying to make you laugh it was the atmosphere of the film and the way in which a lot of people were laughing along with him that was uncomfortable. I kind of felt like that curly-haired guy they hang out with who apologises to him at the prom. I was kind of disgusted by the other people but not for the same reason, you kind of just sit there shouting out ‘he’s a murderer!’ whilst being unable to prove it throughout the film. The more the film tries to make you laugh, the more it distances itself from Lynch’s performance. I feel like the humour takes the darkening edge off and so, it doesn’t work well with the characterisation work that he has clearly put in.

The atmosphere of the film did really feel like something straight out of a graphic novel though. The daytime was overtly sunny and the nighttime scenes were very dark and shadowy almost overly so. I feel like this worked well with the characterisation of Dahmer by Lynch who did not give Dahmer a shred of sympathy and made him out to be this isolated boy who is pretty much to blame for all of his own incidents. It was distanced from his parents so much so that Lynch was successful in making all this shite look like Dahmer’s own fault from the chemistry shed being knocked down to picking up the man from the concert and having him never seen again.

I honestly feel like this film had a number of things that worked: Ross Lynch and Alex Wolff worked really hard on differentiating their characters and making their characters seem entirely genuine and that was brilliant. But I feel like the other characters, especially the background characters make the film seem almost light-hearted and so, I am not sure how to feel about the entire thing as a whole.

The cinematography is brilliant though, again it makes it look like it is adapted from a graphic novel. There’s a lot of cuts, not many tracking shots, there’s one or two strange shots here and there that are either super close-ups or angled shots. If you think about it, it does a good job of making the film seem like a graphic novel without making it Sin City-esque or, on the other side, completely cliché.

Whilst the film does a good job of the adaptation of a graphic novel and whilst the two main characters have possibly done their best work in film so far, especially coming out of the Disney and Nickelodeon work, the film is a bit too light-hearted for me to feel entirely comfortable. I also though, think that the entire purpose of the film is to make you film uncomfortable because of the fact the physical darkness of the graphic novel doesn’t translate to film very well. So, I want to confirm that there’s a fine line between making me feel uncomfortable and making me feel a little bit sick - but that may be blamed on the fact I drank half a bottle of Vodka in about 15 minutes.