My Friend Dahmer (2017)

Marc Meyers adapts John Backderf's graphic memoir with a restraint that now reads as almost antique. Here is a film about a serial killer's adolescence that declines to explain him, indict the culture that produced him, or hand the audience a lesson on the way out. It simply watches. Bath, Ohio, 1978: a boy dissolves roadkill in acid, drinks his way through his parents' divorce, and drifts through a high school that treats him as a curiosity. The camera keeps a polite distance. Nobody turns to the lens to tell us how to feel.

The film's only genuinely charged content is its treatment of Dahmer's homosexuality, which it presents as a symptom of his fixation on control and corpses, not as an identity to be affirmed. His fixation on a jogger curdles into stalking, and the fantasy life he builds around a doctor's body is meant to disturb, not to represent. Elsewhere the picture is barren of contemporary social furniture. The suburb is white and the film has nothing to say about that. There is no economic critique, no environmental conscience, no celebration of bodies or brains. The mother's mental illness is presented as a private catastrophe, not a community to be accommodated.

This is a film that trusts silence. It offers no closing statement, no plea, no scolding. The final title cards simply report what happened to Steven Hicks. For a viewer accustomed to being addressed directly from the screen, the effect is disorienting, like being left alone in a room after a lecture. The film is empathetic, troubling, and entirely unwilling to tell us what it means. It classifies as a historical document, and it wears that classification without complaint.