My Friend Dahmer is a vivid 1970s period piece, reeking of Mad magazine and acid rock, and with his trippy, expressive black-and-white drawings, Backderf shows how the sickness of that self-obsessed decade is somehow inseparable from the disease that drove Dahmer.
Time Entertainment online Despite the potentially lurid and exploitative sounding subject matter, this portrait of the high ... Read moreschool days of serial killer-to-be Jeffrey Dahmer, adapted from John Backderf's graphic novel, is a serious and compassionate work.
The Crack Marc Meyers's MY FRIEND DAHMER is the haunting, sad, funny, true story of Jeffrey Dahmer in high school, based on Derf Backderf's critically acclaimed 2012 graphic novel of the same name.
From Page to Screen Based on the graphic novel memoir by Derf Backderf - a fair-weather friend of Dahmer's from high school - Meyers' film is a ghoulishly funny and profoundly sad portrait of a future killer.
Total Film A thoughtful adaptation of his schoolmate John Backderf's Robert Crumb-styled graphic novel, rich with detail and regret, it deconstructs the perfect storm of failures -by family, by friends, in his school life-that let him slip. [...] A humane film, this takes its responsibility as a true story seriously, without the luridness or cheap jump scares of Ed Gein (2000). Shot in Dahmer's utterly suburban childhood home, and cleaving tightly to Backderfs wish to bear witness, it's an exquisite dissection of how monsters are not only born, but also made.
Sight & Sound magazine Show Less