Netflix has consistently courted controversy as a core tenet of its audience strategy, with its true-crime offerings often standing accused of shamelessly exploiting real-life tragedy for viewer consumption. A prime and recent example is Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), a biographical miniseries accused of revictimising the families of the seventeen murdered young men. Whether such accusations are entirely merited or not, the act of exploitation is hardly novel; the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer has proven a morbidly fertile ground for dramatisation long before Netflix entered the fray. Among the several filmic attempts to reconstruct his life, one of the most notable is David Jacobson’s 2002 film Dahmer, starring a then-relatively unknown Jeremy Renner. This earlier work, while operating on a far smaller scale and with markedly different intentions than its flashy successor, engages in a similarly fraught endeavour: to explore the psyche of a monster without becoming monstrous itself.
The film’s plot is a tightly focused, non-linear character study, concentrating on Dahmer’s final murderous spree in Milwaukee in 1991. Jeremy Renner’s Dahmer is portrayed not as a raving fiend but as an ordinary, unassuming, and profoundly lonely man, burdened by alcoholism. The narrative follows his nocturnal routines in gay bars, his method of luring men back to his apartment, and his horrific rituals of drugging, murdering, and dismembering his victims. Key sequences include the harrowing encounter with Khamtay (based on Konerak Sinthasomphone, played by Bruce Dion), whom Dahmer manages to reclaim from police through chilling deception, and the film’s climax, where his attempted murder of Roy (based on Tracey Edwards, played by Artel Great) fails, leading to his capture. Intercutting this present-tense horror are flashbacks to Dahmer’s adolescence, his fraught relationship with his father Lionel (Bruce Davison), and his first murder of a hitchhiker (based on Steve Hicks, played by Matt Newton). The screenplay, co-written by Jacobson and David Birke, was primarily based on Court TV trial reports and Lionel Dahmer’s book A Father’s Story, with the opening titles frankly admitting to fictionalisation and the use of changed names for some victims—a nod to artistic license that nonetheless highlights the ethical tightrope walked by all such dramatisations.
Jacobson’s film is distinguished by its determined avoidance of sensationalism, a conscious choice that sets it apart from more lurid entries in the genre. Made on a modest budget, it functions less as a thriller or horror film and more as a clinical, almost claustrophobic, psychological portrait. The most interesting and contentious aspect of Dahmer is its deliberate attempt to humanise its subject. The film presents him not as a cartoonish sadist but as a tragically broken individual seeking a perverse, permanent union with his victims to combat his isolating loneliness. This approach avoids easy condemnation in favour of a more disquieting complexity, a technique that later series like Monster would also employ, albeit with a broader canvas.
This nuanced characterisation owes everything to Jeremy Renner’s mesmerising performance. At the time a little-known actor, Renner delivers a portrayal of unsettling quietness and palpable inner turmoil, capturing Dahmer’s disturbing blend of banality and pathology. His work was hailed by critics and is widely credited with launching his career, leading directly to his casting in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. He is ably supported by Artel Great, who brings a palpable humanity and resilience to the role of Roy, the intended victim who fights back. Jacobson’s direction is similarly restrained, demonstrating solid skill. While the film does not shy away from gore or severed body parts, these elements feel appropriate to the subject matter rather than exploitative. The homoerotic scenes are handled with a stark, matter-of-fact tone that feels tame by modern standards. A notable artistic choice is the pronounced use of cinematography, particularly the pervasive, sickly red lighting in Dahmer’s apartment, which visually manifests the corruption and horror contained within its walls.
However, the film’s most significant failure is structural and contextual. It relies heavily on the audience possessing prior knowledge of Dahmer’s crimes and eventual fate. Consequently, the ending, with Roy’s escape, feels abrupt and anti-climactic. Jacobson pointedly refuses to depict the aftermath—the arrest, the trial, Dahmer’s death in prison—opting instead for explanatory text titles. This choice, while perhaps intended to keep the focus rigidly on the psychological study, ultimately leaves the narrative feeling incomplete, more like a vignette than a fully realised story. It assumes the viewer will fill in the gaps, a gamble that may leave those unfamiliar with the case unsatisfied. This stands in contrast to the more comprehensive, if controversial, narrative scope of later series like Monster, which sought to cover a wider timeline, albeit while being accused of “cannibalising its own good intentions.”
In the end, David Jacobson’s Dahmer is a solid, dark, and fascinatingly well-made film. It is a compelling exercise in understated filmmaking and a showcase for a star-making performance from Jeremy Renner. Its attempt to explore the human emptiness at the core of inhuman acts is both its strength and its most ethically ambiguous facet. Yet, for all its merits, the 2002 film ultimately serves as a single, intense chapter in a much broader and darker story—a story that many in the audience may, quite understandably, find too grim to contemplate in its entirety. Its existence, like the later Netflix series, underscores a persistent tension in true crime: the audience's “morbid curiosity” against the backdrop of real trauma. While Dahmer handles its subject with more restraint and artistic integrity than many, it remains part of a continuum that transforms profound human suffering into a narrative commodity, a process that continues to provoke necessary debate about the limits of dramatisation.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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