Evan Peters, Richard Jenkins and Niecy Nash give strong performances in a crime drama that too often repeats itself. The passages devoted to victims suggest a more worthwhile series than the prolonged study of Dahmer delivers.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is a well-acted crime drama that spends too long repeating its most unpleasant material. It wants to examine the failures that allowed Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes to continue and give proper attention to the people he harmed. Yet its early biographical emphasis keeps bringing us back to Dahmer, as though another examination of him will explain what the previous one could not. Across ten episodes, that becomes exhausting.
Evan Peters is a substantial reason to persist. His performance as Jeffrey Dahmer sustains an unsettling presence even when the writing has stopped offering much new to consider. We were worn down by the repeated attention to the grisly details of the crimes. There comes a point when another passage of appalling behaviour merely confirms what the programme has already established, and the performance cannot make that repetition useful.
Richard Jenkins, as Lionel Dahmer, and Niecy Nash, as Glenda Cleveland, make the wider cast worth attending to. Both give the series a reason to move beyond its scrutiny of the killer, and both are underserved by the uneven attention paid to other lives. The material concerned with the parents broadens the account, though it still keeps the questions close to Dahmer. For a programme professing concern for victims, the time allotted to each perspective matters.
Jason McCormick and John T. Connor’s cinematography gives the series a sepia cast that makes the prolonged unpleasantness still more oppressive. It is a consistent look, but there is little respite from its insistence that everything must feel dreadful. Matthew Flood Ferguson’s production design is caught in that treatment, with the surroundings chiefly reinforcing the discomfort. The visual coherence is a virtue, yet the programme needs more changes of emphasis if it is going to hold our attention for this long.
The editing, credited to Curtis Thurber, Regis Kimble, Taylor Joy Mason and Stephanie Filo, leaves the shifts between biography and the wider failures feeling awkward. Too much material repeats the same points before the series gets round to people and questions that warrant more attention. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s music contributes to the unease, although further unease is seldom what these passages need. The slow progress makes the accumulated discomfort harder to tolerate.
The sixth episode shows what changes when a victim’s life receives sustained attention. Its use of sound and its interest in that person’s history allow the programme to spend time on something beyond the details of a crime. We were moved by the care given to that history. The improvement is considerable, and it makes the decision to spend so much time with Dahmer elsewhere more frustrating.
Crime drama can examine a perpetrator closely and still find room for the people around him. Here, the stronger attention to victims and institutional failure comes after too much familiar, punishing biography, and it cannot repair the series’ uneven shape. The good performances and the more thoughtful passages keep it from being a simple exercise in unpleasantness. Anyone drawn by the cast should be prepared for long stretches when the programme has little to offer beyond another reason to feel ill.
