Dahmer Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 15, 2020
When
Dahmer showed up in my review queue a couple of days ago, I had a passing thought that I had reviewed it before since I
immediately associated the name in the title with an MVD Blu-ray release for some reason. I then
remembered the film I had reviewed was actually
My Friend
Dahmer, which was released by MVD in collaboration with FilmRise back in 2018. While they sport slightly different titles, in at least some
ways the films
might be deemed to be somewhat interchangeable, not due just to their shared subject matter, but also due
in some measure to their vaguely similar attempts to humanize one of the most horrifying serial murderers in the annals of American history.
That said, the two films offer manifestly different stories in their own way, with
My Friend Dahmer concentrating mostly on a high
school aged kid
about to become a serial murderer, while
Dahmer ping pongs between a "present" featuring Dahmer (Jeremy
Renner) nearing the end of his killing, and flashbacks that deal with him "getting there", some which offer at
least
some of the same general time frame as
My Friend Dahmer, but which can also include periods both before and after the events depicted in
that particular film.
My Friend Dahmer had the perceived imprimatur of having been culled from a work (a graphic novel) done by someone who actually
knew
and evidently quite liked Jeffrey Dahmer in his high school days.
Dahmer on the other hand rather infelicitously attempts to blend fact
with
fiction(alization), with the result being undeniably disturbing but also feeling more than a bit exploitative a lot of the time. The film begins with a
somewhat true account of one of the horrendous murders conducted by Dahmer, in this case a May 1991 event where the victim,
who had already been drugged and, unbelievably, given what amounted to a lobotomy (courtesy of a power drill) by Dahmer, managed
to
escape. Milwaukee police were actually called when two women found the poor guy stumbling in an alleyway, but just as unbelievably, Dahmer
showed up, claimed the guy was his boyfriend, and the cops let Dahmer "keep" him. While the film at least alludes to this, it doesn't overtly
mention
the fact that the cops, who accompanied Dahmer back to his apartment, were so derelict in their duties that they didn't find a rotting
corpse
of a
previous victim of Dahmer which was in Dahmer's bedroom all the time.
What
Dahmer doesn't really get into, and what
My Friend Dahmer courtesy of its anchoring the pre-crime period of its title
character's life also never really addressed, is that Dahmer was already a registered sex offender by the time this "first" escapee made it out of the
killer's lair. While
Dahmer gives probably appropriate lip service to some of the emotional traumas Dahmer at least
felt he
suffered (something that
My Friend Dahmer also gets into, albeit with more of a focus on Dahmer's mother, who is completely absent
from this telling), it has to be said that one reason Dahmer was able to commit so many murders is due to some really pretty shoddy policing at the
time, perhaps due at least in part to the fact that the victims may have been seen as "unimportant".
In terms of the subtext of that "unimportance",
Dahmer does do a more overt job of detailing Dahmer's struggles with his homosexuality,
and how that issue played out within the context of his family, in this film given over largely to interactions with Dahmer's martinet father Lionel
(Bruce Davison). It's rather interesting to contrast this
Dahmer with
My Friend Dahmer, since the other film paints an arguably
less
fractious picture of the family in some regards, albeit with a more clearly defined subplot involving the mental instability of Dahmer's
mother.
Dahmer does feature a riveting performance by Jeremy Renner as the title character, and some of the scenes with Dahmer coaxing
unaware young men back to his apartment are truly chilling. But the film never really adequately digs beneath the surface, despite obvious
attempts to provide some kind of psychological underpinning to it all. It may well be that evil this overwhelming can't be explained away, no
matter how noble the effort, but that said, there's still a slightly sleazy feeling to this film that rather interestingly is pretty much completely absent
from
My Friend Dahmer.
Dahmer Blu-ray, Video Quality
Dahmer is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of the MVD Marquee Collection, an imprint of MVD Visual, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in
1.85:1. This is a rather widely variable looking presentation that is further hobbled by some pretty recurrent damage (for what looks like a particularly
badly placed blemish on a frame, see screenshot 13), aspects which, along with things like prevalent wobble in the opening and closing credits, suggest
to me this could be an older master or at least one that hasn't been culled from any major effort at restoration. The palette in its best moments is
decently suffused and warm (see screenshot 5), but a lot of the color here can look faded and kind of brown or even yellow (there's a surplus of yellow
lighting in the film
which may add to this perception). There are also some curiously noisy, ragged looking moments that just kind of spring up on occasion, even when
other shots in the same sequence can look relatively unscathed. Contrast, for example, screenshot 6, which is part of the coverage of what I presume
to be a master shot shown in screenshot 19, and you can see some of the very large variations in quality on display here. The roughness does not
necessarily seem to be tied solely to lighting issues, as there are some relatively bright scenes that can look blotchy and pixellated, as well as some
dark scenes that feature a much more finely resolved grain field and better detail levels.
Dahmer Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
According to
this NPR article, Kathryn Bigelow cast
Renner in
The Hurt Locker after having seen his
performance
in
Dahmer, and there's probably little question that it's Renner's star turn here that gives the film a lot of its edginess. There are some
probably unavoidably creepy scenes in this film, but I found the attempts at offering psychological "reasons" for things not very convincing.
Interestingly, this film begins with a text card which could almost be substituted with a text card from the
end of
My Friend Dahmer,
which may suggest for some intrepid true crime aficionados, the two films might make for an interesting double feature. Video is
problematic at times, but audio is fine, and there are a couple of appealing supplements, for those who are considering a purchase.
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