My Friend Dahmer

An absolutely interminable misfire, My Friend Dahmer chronicles the teen years of notorious serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) – with the movie following the oddball loner as he befriends a trio of goofy outsiders. Filmmaker Marc Meyers delivers an excessively familiar story that’s rife with eye-rollingly hackneyed elements, as the director, working from his own screenplay, seems to have mostly culled the movie’s narrative directly from a template for stories of this ilk – with the film’s coming-of-age atmosphere touching on virtually every cliche one associates with the genre. The punishingly uninteresting and uninvolving vibe is compounded by a glacial pace and star Lynch’s hopelessly flat performance, with, in terms of the latter, the actor delivering wooden work that boils down to bad posture and a blank stare. There’s nothing here to set My Friend Dahmer apart from a myriad of other similarly-themed dramas, and it’s never not painfully clear that were it stripped of its Jeffrey Dahmer angle, the movie would hardly be worth mentioning at all. The degree to which this mess is unable to even partially get inside its subject’s head is nothing short of astonishing, with the end result an almost entirely worthless trainwreck that has little of interest to say about a fascinating figure.

* out of ****