“I pick up road kill, but I’m trying to quit,” says Jeff to neighbours who label him a freak. The lone runner on the road outside will fall prey to his stares several times throughout the film but there are smaller fish to fry to begin with, and animals to dissolve in acid. Breaking through these fragile layers of glass over time we come to learn Jeff’s true nature but even at this early stage his deadened gaze betrays murderous urges. Big, metal-framed glasses sit off kilter and, further, he looks through the window of a bus at a jogger running by. If the eyes offer a window to a person’s soul then the first frame of My Friend Dahmer make it very clear that Jeff’s is a blackened, demonic one. The school environment is more Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused than Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and this colourful, frequently playful and comic aesthetic jars devilishly with the black, sadistic heart that beats to the drum of Dahmer’s growing rage. Struggling through the misery of school, he will be adopted as a twisted mascot of sorts for a group of peers intent on leaving their disruptive mark before heading off to college. Jeff (a magnetic, deeply disquieting Ross Lynch) is a simple, admittedly unusual young man whose troubled personal existence couples with an innate evil to create a monster. We are witness to the calm before the storm, the formation of one of America’s most notorious serial killers. It is all that doesn’t happen, all that we expect but which does not transpire and the sense of unnerving dread felt throughout that creates moments of heart-stopping anguish. Sitting uncomfortably with the knowledge of what Jeffrey Dahmer would become in his adult years, it is the suggestion, allusion and all that is hinted at and withheld in Meyers’ film which leaves a traumatic mark.

But in Marc Meyers’ My Friend Dahmer, the words reverberate chillingly thanks to its now notorious principal subject. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A common question to pose to a group of teens approaching the end of high school.

My friend dahmer movie october