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The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.

Far from closing the case, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files opens up a whole new perspective, acknowledging the banal and the baffling.

Teasing out a subversive portrait of a complex and rather subdued monster, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files unfolds with the same meticulousness exemplified by the eponymous serial killer.

In the end, the filmmakers don't reveal a lot of new insights into Dahmer's character, or answer questions about how all these murders went unnoticed before Dahmer was apprehended. In some ways, we are left to fill in the blanks - and that can be a queasy experience.

If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.

Thompson assembles his footage with an expert's touch, but what his film lacks is its own perspective on these atrocities.

One gets the feeling that Thompson left a lot on the table with The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, that it could have been something more, something bigger, something elaborate. And that may be true. But the film that Thompson did choose to make - one that is both simple but effective -- is fascinating in its own right.

Quite frankly, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files would have been better if it had a little more meat on its bones.

The whole film seems dead set against offering up any kind of salaciousness. Like the overly arty "Zoo" and other indie experiments, it misses the point in a disturbing way.

All of that ends up making this movie — originally titled “Jeff,” in a telling bit of overpersonalization — feel like a late-night cable-news hack job.