Sadly Over-hyped

hyped garbage

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Renner makes this movie worth watching. His acting of such a complex and disturbed individual is amazing. Its important to remember that Dahmer had a psychological disorder which deeply affected his emotions and Renner manages to convey the deep and painful emotions even through the cold and stoic face Dahmer presented. But as for the movie itself, it misses the majority of what makes Dahmer's case so memorable. In order to understand Dahmer and his actions there must be a portrayal of how desperate he was for a companion - the driving force behind so many of his experiments and murders. The movie switches back and forth between time periods in Dahmer's life with little explanation or transition making it hard to follow if you are not intimately familiar with the case. If you are familiar with the case you may enjoy seeing such an interesting portrayal of the man himself but you are likely to be disappointed by all the missing details. For true crime fans its not a waste of time but it won't be something you'll come back to again and again. For Jeremy Renner fans though, you'll see a lot of what makes him such a great actor.

--Warning Spoilers--I've seen this movie 5 years ago for the first time and it had a huge impact on me! This movie became one of my favorite movies of all time and I'm still shocked that this movie scored into a 5 and not higher. This movie had everything there should be and to my saying it absolutely perfect! The way dahmer got portrayed from inside and outside couldn't have been better. Jeremy Renner looks A lot like dahmer i have to say even in the scenes he plays as young jeff dahmer it looks exactly how it should be. The movie leaves you feeling extremely empty and even sorry for dahmer. In total i must've watched it like 6 times and it still amazes me how good of a movie this is even though it was low-budget!

This is the worst movie I've ever seen. How can you screw up a film about one of the most notorious serial killers of all time? I want to know what made him the way he was, how he justified his crimes in his mind, what exactly he did to his victims, how did he get caught... None of these question are answered in this movie. It's just Dahmer hanging out with some gay guy for two hours. We see scenes with a sedated Asian man in his bed, but there is no foreground nor follow up as to how he got there or what happened to him. The movie is dreadfully boring, uneventful, and pointless. To top it all of the actors are bad and emotionless.

There's just something about serial killers. When I first saw this, it was a couple of years after it had come out and was being broad-casted on television. I think there was a theme of broadcasts from all sorts of media about serial killers that week; having watched a good chunk of them, because they were morbidly fascinating, I found myself enthralled without really understanding what I was watching. Back then, I was just a typical, angry teenager-searching for some kind of identity-and finding myself relating to the emotions being portrayed. Years after my initial viewing, I rediscovered Jeremy Renner through the recent films he has made over the past 5 years. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was his acting that made me so compelled to finish "Dahmer", even knowing about the crimes the real Dahmer committed. After watching it a second time, now that I'm older and wiser, I feel like I truly appreciated what the film was trying to give the viewer. Some have said that the film is lacking in true expression of Dahmer's crimes; I disagree. Just because we don't see a full on display of what he did, we can still see the emotions in Renner's face; we can still see the human being. I gave this a 10 out of 10 because it is an excellent study of human emotions coming from a less than mainstream plot.