My Friend Dahmer (2017)
January 24, 2018 7:24 PM - Subscribe

A young Jeffrey Dahmer struggles to belong in high school.

(The imdb description really undersells it.)
posted by phunniemee (6 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Just saw this tonight at a sold out theater. I thought it was really well done. We all know who Jeffrey Dahmer is, so you spend the whole movie dreading what you know will happen, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think they showed an incredible amount of restraint, considering. A truly unsettling and uncomfortable hour and a half.

I don't know how widely this is available to see, but if you have the opportunity and are kind of interested but on the fence because, y'know, Dahmer's one gross creepy fuck and you're not sure you need to see that, you should see it. It's not that kind of movie.
posted by phunniemee at 7:30 PM on January 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


As far as I can tell this is based on the comic; can anyone who has read the comic and seen the movie share how closely the latter follows the former?
posted by elsietheeel at 9:08 PM on January 24, 2018


I follow Derf on fb and he seems happy with the adaptation.
posted by brujita at 2:16 PM on January 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've wanted to see this for a while, but it didn't play Boston for some reason. I believe they shot on location at the old Dahmer house, which belonged to the guy who wrote "I Know What Boys Like".
posted by pxe2000 at 7:27 AM on January 30, 2018


I finally got around to seeing this, after having read the graphic novel (and the shorter single-issue comic that preceded it) some time ago. It's pretty faithful to the GN; the scene at the end is different in that IRL Derf didn't almost become Dahmer's first victim (Derf did give Dahmer a ride home, the last time he saw him, but the hitchhiker was probably already dead by that point). Also, Anne Heche as his mom seems quite a bit different than the portrayal in the GN in a way that's difficult to pin down. (One way that's obvious is that Derf thinks that, although Dahmer's "act" is based largely on his mom's decorator friend, the seizures seem to be an imitation of his mom having them; this isn't referenced in the movie.) Otherwise, it follows things pretty closely.

I ended up seeing this on IMDb TV, which restores the ancient practice of having commercial interruptions; they were especially jarring in the context of this movie.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:06 PM on July 20, 2021


Made a mistake--in the GN, it was another member of the Dahmer Fan Club that gave Dahmer a ride home, not Derf. Also, I didn't realize that the guy who tries to get Dahmer to play Russian roulette is Lloyd Figg, who is very different in the GN.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:21 AM on July 21, 2021


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