Portrait of killer no work of art

not comfortable with while putting his body through hell.

Lynch’s effective and relatively restrained performance is even more pleasing given the bizarre turn delivered by Anne Heche – an actress I’ve never been a huge fan of – as Dahmer’s mother Joyce.

Backderf is played by Alex Wolff ( Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) and it’s astonishing to see how honest the novelist is in how he exploited Dahmer’s unusual behaviour; in fact, in a number of scenes Wolff is actually more disturbing than Lynch.

While Meyers shows impressive restraint, there are moments where his film feels like it’s sleepwalking and you long for something with a bit more substance to happen.

We never truly get under the skin of Dahmer which makes the horrendous turn his later life takes harder to understand.

This is also a film lacking anyone to root for as no-one emerges unscathed, or without literal or figurative blood on their hands.

Whether accurate or not, there’s also something a little generic about much of young Dahmer’s behaviour – killing animals, troubled home life, bullied at school – that comes across like a “building a serial killer 101” movie template.

The claustrophobic seventies setting convinces but the same can’t be said for all of the wigs and ill-fitting clothing worn by the cast.

Try as he might Meyers can’t deliver the definitive portrait of Dahmer; and it’s intriguing to think how this might have worked in the hands of a more experienced director.