Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) poster

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Directors – (Episode 1) Carl Franklin, (Episode 2&3) Clement Virgo, (Episodes 4-5, 7&9) Jennifer Lynch, (Episodes 6&10) Paris Barclay & (Episode 8) Gregg Araki, Teleplay – (Episodes 1-4) Ian Brennan & Ryan Murphy, (Episode 5) Ian Brennan, (Episode 6) David McMillan & Janet Mock, (Episode 7) Ian Brennan, David McMillan & Janet Mock, (Episode 8) Ian Brennan & David McMillan, (Episode 9) Ian Brennan, David McMillan & Reilly Smith & (Episode 10) Ian Brennan, Todd Kubrak David McMillan & Reilly Smith, Created by Ian Brennan & Ryan Murphy, Producers – Lou Eyrich, Matthew Hart, Richard Jenkins, Regis Kimble, Todd Kubrak, Todd Nenninger & Reilly Smith, Photography – (Episode 1-5, 7&9) Jason McCormick (Episode 6,8&10) & John Thomas Connor, Music – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, Visual Effects – Fuse FX (Supervisor – Josh Miyagi), Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Byers, Makeup Effects – Arjen Tuiten, Production Design – Matthew Flood Ferguson. Production Company – Prospect Films/Ryan Murphy Television.

Cast

Evan Peters (Jeffrey Dahmer), Richard Jenkins (Lionel Dahmer), Niecy Nash (Glenda Cleveland), Michael Learned (Catherine Dahmer), Molly Ringwald (Shari Dahmer), Penelope Ann Miller (Joyce Dahmer), Rodney Burford (Tony Hughes), Michael Beach (Detective Murphy), Colby French (Patrick Kennedy), Josh Braaten (Young Lionel Dahmer), Savannah Brown (Young Joyce Dahmer), Shaun J. Brown (Tracy Edwards), Cameron Cowperthwaite (Steven Hicks), Dyllon Burnside (Ronald Flowers), Vince Hill-Bedford (Steven Tuomi), Karen Malina White (Shirley Hughes), Nigel Gibbs (Jesse Jackson), Khetphet Phagnasay (Sayamone Sinthasomphone), David Barrera (Chief Arreola), Raphael Sbarge (Mayor John Norquist), Furly Mac (Christopher Scarver), Dominic Burgess (John Wayne Gacy), Kieran Tamondong (Konerak Sinthasomphone), Max Brandt (Officer Rauth), Grant Harvey (Officer Mueller), Ken Lerner (Joe Zilber), Chris Greene (Chaplain Adams)


Plot

Milwaukee, 1991. Jeffrey Dahmer brings Tracy Edwards back to his apartment, paying him money to pose for nude photographs. Tracy makes an escape after Dahmer drugs his drink and acts in a disturbed manner. The police are called, arresting Dahmer after finding severed heads and body parts in the apartment and bodies dissolved in a drum of acid. Dahmer makes a full confession to police. As a child, he was without friends but his father Lionel encouraged interest in vivisecting dead animals. Following his parents’ divorce, the teenage Jeffrey was abandoned in the house alone for some months by his mentally unbalanced mother Joyce. It was then then he made his first kill with jogger Steven Hicks after being rebuffed for trying to initiate gay sex. After a string of job failures and being discharged from the army, Dahmer returned to Milwaukee, going to stay with his grandmother. There he began drugging men in gay bathhouses before being banned. He started sneaking men into the house while his grandmother was asleep, drugging and killing them before dissecting them in the basement. Forced to move out, he took an apartment and continued his spree of killings. Neighbour Glenda Cleveland tried to alert police to the foul smells and suspicious activity coming from next door on multiple occasions but was ignored. In the aftermath of Dahmer’s arrest, the police response causes ripples throughout the community.


Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994) has an infamy as a serial killer. Dahmer was apprehended in 1991 when intended victim Tracy Edwards managed to escape and called the police. In the subsequent investigation, Dahmer’s apartment was found filled with severed heads, organs and body parts, as well as bodies dissolved in a 52 gallon drum of acid. Arrested, Dahmer made a confession to having drugged and killed other men and having had sex with their dead bodies since the age of fourteen. He confessed to having killed seventeen men. He would usually lure them to his apartment to watch porn or pose for photos and then drug them. He would have sex with the corpses, eat their flesh and keep severed heads, hands, penises and other body parts as souvenirs in his apartment. In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 927 years in prison, although this ended shortly into his sentence when he was murdered by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.

The life and crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer have had considerable fascination in the public eye. Dahmer has been portrayed on film in the likes of The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993), Dahmer (2002), Raising Jeffrey Dahmer (2006), the quasi-documentary/drama The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and My Friend Dahmer (2017), dealing with Dahmer’s school years. He also makes appearances in Diary of a Serial Killer (2008), is resurrected/turns up as a ghost in Death Factory (2014) and the Devil’s Night (2015) episode of American Horror Story, and makes gonzo appearances in Dahmer vs Gacy (2010), Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver (2011) and Dumb & Dahmer (2021). Around the same time as this, Netlfix also premiered the three-part documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes (2022).

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story comes from Ryan Murphy, creator/producer of some of the top tv series since the 2000s, including Glee (2009-15), Pose (2016-21), Hollywood (2020) and Ratched (2020), including personal favourites like Nip/Tuck (2003-10), American Crime Story (2016- ) and Feud (2017- ). Murphy has dabbled in genre material on a number of occasions with the ongoing hit of the tv series American Horror Story (2011- ) and its spinoff anthology series American Horror Stories (2021- ), as well as Scream Queens (2015-6), which had a side-splitting first season, and the mini-series The Watcher (2022). In addition, Murphy has also produced the horror films The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) and Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022). Murphy had previously detailed the life of serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the second season of American Crime Story entitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022)
Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer

There is an excellent opening as Even Peters’ Dahmer brings his last intended victim Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown) back to his apartment, insisting he just wants to take some pictures and we see Peters drugging his drink, taking him to the bedroom where things become decidedly creepy before Brown manages to make an escape, leading to Dahmer’s arrest. The scene is drawn out for nearly 30 minutes, over half the episode, before Brown makes an escape. During this time, we are fully immersed in the creepy, drearily mundane world that Dahmer inhabits. Everything takes place at a slow, simmering burn where a sense of threat constantly lurks. It’s a great opening that bodes well for the series.

This develops even more of a creepy fascination when it comes to Episode 2. This is a replication of the infamous scene where Dahmer invited Konerak Sinthasomphone (Kieran Tamondong) back to his place, drugged him and then we see Evan Peters raising the power drill before the unconscious Tamondong, before Tamondong stumbles out of the apartment and the cops are called, which ends with Evan Peters walking up the street, calmly assuring the officers that this is no more than an issue between gay lovers and for them to return a drunk Tamondong into his care.

There have been a good many biopics of serial killers before this. I have a listing of them here at True Crime Films. I have been impressed by Ryan Murphy’s various American Crime Story series and the exacting replication of the minutiae of detail in the stories they are telling. In this regard, Dahmer is an extraordinary work that goes places no other true crime film or tv series has before. It covers every imaginable aspect of Dahmer’s life – his psychology, his life circumstances, and doesn’t shy away from any of it (except perhaps showing him engaged in performing indignities on corpses – although we do get to see him kissing a severed head at one point). It even goes back to before he was born and his mother was pregnant. Not only that, it expands out and gives entire episodes or sections of story over to the people in Dahmer’s life to tell their story. We even get almost one entire episode from the point-of-view of the deaf character Tony Hughes (Rodney Burford) where the audio in the scene fades to a distant rumble as well.

Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) cruises gay clubs in Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022)
Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) cruises gay clubs

The series probably didn’t ten episodes to be told and could have at least come in three episodes shorter. The initial episodes have a fascinating compulsion in dealing with Dahmer’s psychology and activities. The latter handful of episodes expand out well past his arrest and sentencing where most True Crime stories would end to essentially become a Black Lives Matter of its day. These episodes also take in a number of other issues from Dahmer’s imprisonment, his surprising fandom, the legal fight over earnings from his crimes going to compensate his families, even the courtroom battle over Dahmer’s brain and in the final episode about whether Dahmer should be entitled to Christian forgiveness and how it is possible for someone affected by his crimes (Glenda) to forgive him as a Christian ought to. I won’t say these are uninteresting as that would not be true at all but they lack the disturbed compulsiveness of the earlier episodes and their fearless dive into Dahmer’s psychology.

The series creates surprising sympathy for Dahmer, even at the same time as the very title calls him a monster. At the heart of the story is a character, isolated and friendless, coming from a homelife that was neglectful if not abusive, while struggling with his sexuality at a time when being gay was not widely accepted. The most sympathetic of the episodes is Episode 6 where Dahmer strikes up a connection with deaf Tony Hughes (Rodney Burford) and we almost see things working out in his favour – finding someone who is attracted back and Dahmer resisting the temptation to drug him and holding back on the hammer he has behind his back, while starting to take care in his appearance and admit to feeling happy.

The series features a phenomenal performance from Evan Peters, who came to attention in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. Peters travels some extraordinary places for the role and nails the dull, affectless mannerisms of Dahmer to perfection, along with the sly sense of deadpan humour. Richard Jenkins, who like Peters also acts as a producer on the series, also gives a great performance as Lionel, struggling to be a father to his son even when he is confronted with the enormity of what Dahmer did.

Jeffry Dahmer (Evan Peters) and father Lionel (Richard Jenkins) in Dahmer Monster The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) 3
(l to r) Jeffry Dahmer (Evan Peters) and father Lionel (Richard Jenkins)

Another great and underrated performance from the previously unknown Niecy Nash who plays Dahmer’s neighbour. She becomes the moral conscience of the show. The Jennifer Lynch directed Episode 7 comes with some fantastic tension during the scene where Dahmer visits her and insists on coming in and offering her a sandwich that contains a suspiciously unidentified meat, which he insists that she eat right there and then, and her ballsy stand against him.

Throughout the cinematographers create a dreary, washed out look. This has become a default look for many films and tv shows since the late 2010s to a point of tedium, often in many cases when it does not suit the show. Here though it is perfect for creating a lifeless sense of nowhere suburban homes and apartments in mid-1970s through 1990s. It creates a sombre, compulsive tone to the at times quite grim proceedings.

(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2022 list. Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Evan Peters) and Best Supporting Actor (Richard Jenkins), Nominee for Best Supporting Actress (Niecy Nash) at this site’s Best of 2022 Awards).


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