My Friend Dahmer

ANDY’S RATING: ★★★ In cinemas on Friday

WHEN Jeffery Dahmer was arrested for the rape and murder of 17 young men, many involving cannabilism and necrophilia, he instantly became the world’s most famous serial killer.

Cartoonist John “Derf” Backderf had a very personal interest in this macabre story. He immediately recognised Dahmer as the strange boy he knew from high school.

This clever but highly disturbing movie of his 2012 graphic novel, recounts their uneasy friendship.

Crucially, it doesn’t glamorise the beast or seek to provide easy explanations for his depravity. On the surface, Dahmer (Ross Lynch) is a typical awkward teenager. But behind the mop of hair and giant glasses, something very odd is stirring.

His dad is worried about Jeff’s hobby of collecting road kill and stripping their flesh with chemicals, but his main concern is his crumbling marriage with Dahmer’s mentally ill mum (Anne Heche).

At school, Dahmer finally makes friends. Derf (Alex Wolff) and his pals are taken with the way he anarchically disrupts lessons by pretending to have seizures. They call this “doing a Dahmer” and form a “fan club”, egging him to more extreme pranks.

Derf doesn’t come out of the film particularly well, but it lets us decide whether it was nature or nurture which created the monster.