The film premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in the United States on November 3, 2017, by Hulu.[3]
The film received generally positive reviews, with critics praising the historical accuracy and Lynch's performance.
Plot
In 1974, Jeffrey Dahmer is a high school freshman living in Bath, Ohio, with his parents, Lionel and Joyce, and his younger brother Dave. Jeffrey develops an obsession with a male jogger he sees every day from his school bus. As a hobby, he collects dead animals that he dissolves to the bone using chemicals from his father, who is a chemist. This hobby is initiated by his obsessive interest in how animals are "fitted together".[4]
In 1978, Lionel trashes Jeffrey's collection of bones and orders him to make friends at school. During school, Jeffrey imitates the speech and gestures of his mother's interior designer (who has cerebral palsy), catching the attention of aspiring artist John "Derf" Backderf and his friends. Jeffrey inspires Derf to draw him in various situations; drawings that would later be incorporated into Derf's graphic novel My Friend Dahmer. Derf and his friends form the "Dahmer Fan Club," using Jeffrey for a variety of pranks (known as “Doing a Dahmer”) such as sneaking him in every yearbook photo, and conning their way to a meeting with Vice PresidentWalter Mondale during a school field trip to Washington, D.C.
Joyce starts relapsing into chronic mental illness, leading to increasingly bitter fights between her and Lionel. To cope, Jeffrey turns to drinking heavily, and begins killing animals. The jogger with whom he is obsessed turns out to be Dr. Matthews, the physician of one of Derf's friends. Jeffrey fakes a cold so that he can get an appointment with him, and he can examine Jeffrey naked. Dr. Matthews becomes uncomfortable when he notices that Jeffrey has an erection. At home, Jeffrey masturbates to the incident and fantasizes about having sex with Dr. Matthews' corpse. He starts stalking Dr. Matthews with a baseball bat, but never goes through with attacking him.
Jeffrey's father moves out. Jeffrey makes attempts to stay connected to his friends but ultimately drifts away from them. At graduation, Lionel hands Jeffrey the keys to the family Volkswagen Beetle which he would later use to commit his first murder. Unbeknownst to Lionel, Joyce leaves Ohio to live with relatives in Wisconsin, taking Dave with her and leaving Jeffrey completely alone.
That evening, Derf spots Jeffrey walking home with blood on his fingernails. Derf offers him a ride, finding him living alone with no plans for the future. Derf tells him that he is leaving for college and offers him his drawings of Jeffrey, which Jeffrey declines. Jeffrey menacingly invites Derf inside for a beer, but he turns him down. As Derf walks back to his car, Jeffrey is about to strike him with a baseball bat but puts it down. As Derf drives home, he notices the bat. Jeffrey never has contact with his high school friends again.
Two weeks later, Jeffrey picks up hitchhiker Steven Hicks. The closing credits note that Hicks was never seen again and Jeffrey Dahmer admitted to killing 17 men when he was finally arrested in 1991.
Ross Lynch was cast as the teenage Dahmer in 2016.[5] Lynch had previously been employed as a teen actor by the Disney Channel, most notably starring in the show Austin & Ally. John Backderf, the author of the graphic novel, was enthusiastic about this casting against type, stating that Lynch's performance would make viewers "uncomfortable because it's so familiar".[6] Later in the month Alex Wolff, Vincent Kartheiser and Anne Heche joined the cast, with Heche playing Dahmer's mother.
Filming took place in Bath, Ohio, and Middleburg Heights, Ohio. Scenes depicting Dahmer's home life were filmed in Dahmer's actual childhood home in Ohio.[7] Actors in the movie said that it was very strange to be in the home where the serial killer lived. They also mentioned that the house is where Dahmer's pathology began.[8]
In comparison to the comic, Derf is added into scenes in the movie that he was not actually present at, including the fishing scene, the DC trip, and the prom. It was also Derf, not Neil, who felt bad about the mall incident. Most prominently, it was Neil who gave Dahmer the final ride home, not Derf, and it was likely right after Hicks’ murder, not before.
Release
My Friend Dahmer premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival on April 21, 2017.[9] On May 15, 2017, FilmRise acquired distribution rights to the film, planning to release it in the fall.[10][11] The film was released in limited theaters on November 3, 2017, with a wider release the following month.[12][13]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 86% rating based on 105 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "My Friend Dahmer opens a window into the making of a serial killer whose conclusions are as empathetic as they are deeply troubling."[14]Metacritic, another review aggregator, assigned the film a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[15]
Box office
My Friend Dahmer was a failure at the box office, grossing $1.4 million on a budget of around $1.5 million.[16]
