'My friend, Dahmer' (2017) - Marc Meyers.

Initially I thought this was going to be an ironic 'Napoleon Dynamite'/Todd Solondz-type of snarky affair, which, perhaps, might have worked too, but in fact the film turned out to be a rather bleak, engrossing drama about an isolated boy whose dark adolescent fantasies matured into something far more devastating in adulthood. I'm no longer at the age where I find serial killers innately fascinating, but Dahmer's home life was an infinitely relatable diorama and I have always felt that even a little kindness and empathy can go a long way in improving a repressed child's morbid outlook, helping to ease the crippling lack of confidence frequent isolation and unleavened loneliness all too frequently creates, and the unfortunate bullying young Dahmer experienced most certainly disturbed and ultimately corrupted an insular young man's reality into something unrecognizably distorted.

This is a fine, sensitively handled drama emboldened by some quality ensemble acting from a clearly committed cast of gifted young actors. It might be fair to say that our corrupt institutions, familial or corporate are insidiously effective at making monsters, being far less successful at preventing them. And 'polite society' hungrily excels at deifying/rewarding the very worst of us in lurid horror films and banal, increasingly prurient crime series. Greed, murder, self-idolatry, success at any cost, sexual perversions, all traits actively championed by the exploitative media, and while it would be impossible to film or recreate the truly grotesque abasements Dahmer's victims experienced, or capture the inconceivable pain the victim's families must still feel, so contriving 'entertainment' from Dahmer's bestial cruelty is an inherently suspect proposition, but I have to accept that I watched young Dahmer's increasingly erratic, morally suspect behaviour with morbid fascination, even enjoying an illicit frisson of grindhouse pleasure when the neophyte degenerate killer finally picked up the baseball bat in order to brain his very first victim! All too frequently the perverse lure of the darkness proves more enticing than the light.