Mi amigo Dahmer

Not a comedy. I repeat, this is not a comedy.

Also of note for the squeamish set: no serial killing here, just the seemingly mundane life of a high school misfit. Jeffery Dahmer is a mopey, four-eyed moptop, shuffling through adolescence, dealing with a fractious household in the bland and brown seventies.

Of course we all know how this plays out, and that ominous shadow creates a vicious tension throughout this excellently unsettling film. Collecting and dissolving road kill in his makeshift shed lab, is certainly cause for concern, but it is Dahmer's awkward interactions with his peers, family, and authority figures, that bring the shivers. We know there is an explosion coming, but we just don't know how or when.

Based on a graphic novel by a high school chum, "My Friend Dahmer" focuses on the usual tribulations of teenagers searching to belong. Either bullied (nasty) or ignored (worse), Dahmer gains a strange semblance of attention by spazzing out in school. If fake epileptic convulsions means popularity, then so be it.

Former Disney star Ross Lynch brings a perfect blend of desperation and dread to the complicated lead. He has issues, but what outcast teen doesn't? Among his many quirks, Dahmer's seemingly innocuous interest in a neighbourhood jogger (a running theme throughout) is one hell of a creepy sequence, even though nothing comes of it. We see a series of small events that may point to the evolution of a monster, or to a weirdo biology major. There's a fork in this road!

This all foreplay movie succeeds brilliantly because it plays the audience, who for once, are itching to spoil the ending.

I gotta say, I liked the graphic novel much more than this movie. In film version, it moved very, very slowly. Still, the topic, Dahmer's high school days, drew me in, in a sort of twisted fascination. Ross Lynch does a very good job in the lead role, sort of a Napoleon Dynamite gone wrong, in an Ed Chigliak sort of way. I was able to feel badly for Dahmer in this phase of his life, and I was left wondering a lot of what if's. I guess every life has these what if's, and Dahmer's ended up taking the horrifying road that it took. Creepy. Even creepier, to me, are the people who "lived" through their encounters with him. What about the prom date? Holy mackerel! A unique look, the unveils itself slowly.

Curious biopic that can't quite decide whether it should be a coming-of-age tale or something more chilling. The confusion unfortunately makes this seem at times sympathetic to the serial killer.

Yes he is obsessed with dead animals and dissolving their remains in acid, but he seems little different from the awkward adolescents of countless other high school movies. Lynch is good and definitely creepy, but not that creepy....

If you're looking for explanations as to why Dahmer went on to murder, necrophilia and cannibalism; this will only partially satisfy you. We see hints that he is becoming isolated and morbidly inclined. He has a strange obsession with a neighbour jogger and is spending too long in the shed carrying out his infernal experiments. And the family background is troubled in the extreme. With a domineering but neurotic mother, and a weak-willed father.

Throughout the film, Lynch always seems to be fighting to keep his demons in check. At one stage it looks as if he is about to murder their pet Labrador, but he pulls himself back. The film constantly make us feel sorry for him. He's a loner trying to fit in, but his dark side eventually overwhelms him. Every time he reaches out to someone, he is rebuffed. As the rejections mount, his behaviour becomes only more erratic.

The film stops just as his murdering career kicks-off. The film lets us make up our own mind about where to place the blame.

Taking place over the course of Jeffrey Dahmer's last year in high school, and culminating with the fateful meeting between Dahmer (Ross Lynch) and Steven Hicks (Dave Sorboro), writer/director Marc Meyers's My Friend Dahmer is based on the graphic novel by John Backderf (played in the film by Alex Wolff), who attended the same school as Dahmer, and formed a pseudo-friendship with him. The film is tonally brilliant, coming across like El club de los cinco (1985) directed by David Fincher, perfectly capturing 80s tackiness. Narratively, however, it's extremely plodding, and could easily have been trimmed by 20 minutes.

It's also difficult to see what Meyers was trying to achieve; other than a couple of brief moments, we're never given any real access to Dahmer's interiority, so he remains an enigma, always at arm's length (which could have been the point). But is Meyers asking us to feel sympathy for Dahmer because he had a difficult adolescence, came from a broken home, couldn't make friends in school. Or is this simply a character study (if we didn't know it was about Dahmer, it could be any number of examinations of high school awkwardness)?

The lack of clarity regarding the film's theme is compounded by the scenes where it looks as if Dahmer is about to murder someone, only to stop at the last second. This is an especially strange way to generate tension, insofar as we already know his first murder was Hicks. Also, if the film is actually trying to say something of societal worth regarding serial killers, directionless youth, nature vs. nurture etc, trying to draw an audience into the narrative with the prospect of murder probably isn't the way to go about it. The film also fails to really get into the issues of Dahmer's sexuality, and his confusion and frustration about being gay. It's worth a look, and Lynch's performance is quite something, but if you're already familiar with Dahmer's story, you won't find much insight here.

I'm a fan of Derf's graphic novel about his teen experiences in the late '70s with Jeff Dahmer -- as a result I had mixed feelings about a film version. On the one hand, I was excited, but on the other was quite curious how the relatively brief story could be turned into a feature length film.

In terms of storytelling, the movie works. Yes, as a reader of the graphic novel may have suspected, the pace ends up being a bit slow, but it's still compelling stuff -- the viewer is there just as Dahmer arrives at a fork in the road of his life. Which way will he take? Will he end up just being an eccentric, or will he take that other, infinitely darker road?

We all know the answer, and of course the movie has a strong tragic element to it. It's all the more tragic -- for Dahmer's victims and their families, but also for Dahmer himself -- when we see that there was just enough to the guy ... just enough potential ... to make him possibly go the other way.

At times watching the movie can be tough going, but not for the reasons you might think. Watching a kid as painfully awkward and then as deeply depressed as Dahmer go through the torture of Middle American high school can be truly excruciating, all the more so because it seems to be happening in slow motion, like watching a car crash. But make no mistake -- it is absorbing human drama, quite unique in our age of comic book heroes and lurid reality TV.

Even if you don't particularly like slow-burn drama, see the movie anyway, for the performances. Lynch doesn't say a lot but he's truly engrossing to watch. Anne Heche is virtually unrecognizable as Dahmer's mother skating along the lip of sanity -- her manic performance is brilliant and unforgettable. And as usual Dallas Roberts impresses as Dahmer's father.

Highly recommended -- but don't go expecting a serial killer flick.