Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: as heartbreaking as it is chilling

The pilot episode of this controversial Netflix series shows in excruciating detail the entrapment of a young man by a drunk and dead-eyed Jeffrey Dahmer. When the young man unexpectedly escapes and the police arrest Dahmer, our sense of relief is bittersweet. We know that it would have been just as truthful for the series to open with a young man being killed by Dahmer.

If Monster begins by reminding us of the terror Dahmer caused, it does so without the spectacle of a murder, and without purporting to put viewers ‘in the shoes of’ real victims. This is one of the ways the show demonstrates a rare understanding of how true-crime formats reveal, better than many others, what filmmakers working from ‘true stories’ really do: they exploit the invisible relations between historical fact, conventional narratives and audience expectations to create heightened onscreen drama.

Many have pointed out that, contrary to what some of the publicity around the show has suggested, Monster does not focus solely on the victims. Fewer have maintained that this might actually be an asset: despite its title, Monster shows that the notorious serial killer was ultimately human. Careful not to make an apology for his crimes, however, it brings Dahmer’s humanity into view only very slowly. Centred on his childhood and teenage years, the second and third episodes reveal that the Dahmer household, while not a happy one, was not particularly monstrous either, even as the filmmaking subtly underlines the constant presence of psychological violence.

Without falling into pop psychology, the series creates a layered portrait that accounts for the way upbringing, circumstances, bad decisions, accidents and other unknowable factors contributed to making Jeffrey Dahmer who he was. Other shows might have stopped there, taking stock of a sad story before fading out in despair. But this one does not: the survivors’ pain, and the system that allowed Dahmer to get away with his crimes for so long, continued to endure. One of the show’s major achievements is to discredit the notion that Dahmer wasn’t caught sooner because his victims, many of them young gay men of colour, had no one who cared about them or reported them missing. The final episodes focus on the families’ ongoing fight to have their loved ones remembered not just as victims, but as people.

In its attempts to foreground the humanity of all concerned parties, the show succeeds in large part thanks to its writing and structure: this story of disconnect, isolation, loneliness and bad habits is particularly suited to the breaks, silences and repetitions the series format is well equipped to take advantage of. Not only that, but the compounding effect of a series allows us to entertain several truths that are often difficult to reconcile. Through it all, Evan Peters’ stunningly grounded performance as a young man untethered from reality and unable or unwilling to find his way back is as heartbreaking as it is chilling.

► Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is available to view on Netflix now.