Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
2022 Netflix
Limited Series
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

It's 1991, and Glenda Cleveland is having trouble sleeping. That's likely because her next door neighbor, Jeffrey Dahmer, is bringing young men and adolescent boys home, drilling holes in their heads, pouring acid on them, carving them up with an electric knife, raping them, and eating them. She can hear it all, smell it all, and when it spills out into the hallway, or outside the complex, see it. The police don't listen. Even when they actually show up, and one of Jeffery's underage victims has escaped to the apartment sidewalk, the police believe Jeffrey over Glenda, and let the evil serial killer take his victim back inside to finish the job. Will this evil bastard ever be caught...or will Glenda's warnings continue to go unheeded until the acid barrel full of victims has overflowed across the entire neighborhood?
Netflix's punctuation-challenged Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has a tricky line to walk. For whatever reason the human race is obsessed with serial killers, and I don't think it's just because we're all a bunch of disgusting psychos. There's a part of us that wants to know "Why or how could one of us do this?" as well as "Am I different from this person? If I look closely at this person, will it verify that I could never be like them?" A serial killer like Dahmer is obviously not operating under a normal human mindset, and while Monster does spend some time and too many episodes showing how Dahmer may have developed into evil incarnate, it at least also spends a hell of a lot of time focusing on his victims. There's no reason this ten-hour mini-series has to be more than three or four, as the first half in particular drags with scene after scene of young Jeffrey...though the payoff for those scenes is more in the way they reveal Dahmer's own family as victims to the horror their oldest child has wrought. Richard Jenkins shines as Jeffrey's father, a man who certainly makes some mistakes, but also earns some empathy as he can't help but feel responsible for the atrocities his son commits. As great as Jenkins is here, though, his performance is but a wave in a sea of brilliant ones.
If Monster wins any awards, they should come in torrents for the actors. As the titular character, Evan Peters is an absolute revelation, disappearing into so many well-practiced tics and mannerisms, it's at times hard to remember you're watching a fictionalized recreation of events and not a documentary. Dahmer is loathsome and Peters is able to somehow inject a little bit of humanity behind the killer's eyes without sensationalizing. Niecy Nash, Peters' main sparring partner, gives the best performance of her career as the tormented Glenda. Nash, who rose to prominence as a comedic actor on projects like Reno 911!, is almost unbelievably good here, as she moves from horrified to incredulous to raging. Indeed, the series' finest moments come when it focuses on the victims and those ill-affected by Dahmer. The standout episode of the ten, the series midpoint, "Silenced," focuses entirely on Tony Hughes, a deaf victim, as he tries to work toward his dreams in a new town before his life is tragically cut short by Dahmer.
Again, I can't help but think that the show would have not only benefitted from a shorter runtime, but an even heavier focus on the victims. Showrunner, Ryan Murphy, is not exactly known for restraint. However, I do believe his trademarked lack of restraint is relegated to the way the runtime is bloated, rather than to the content, as the show does handle a rather sensational story as tastefully as it could, even if Jeffrey himself receives a bit too much screen time. Perhaps that bloated runtime is simply a negative result of the streaming model, which calls for as much content as possible. As it stands, Monster contains a lot of fine material that registers as part of a good working print that could have perhaps been whittled into a masterpiece. *I dedicate this last paragraph to Garth Franklin, in whose style it was written.*