“Dahmer”, an investigation into the cannibal from Milwaukee who does not justify and touches nerves still uncovered (grade 8) – Corriere.it

Jeffrey Dahmer, the charm of Evil. That repeats itself. After two films, two documentaries (one will arrive soon on Netflix) the story of the famous cannibal serial killer who seduced, drugged, killed his victims, preferably young and African American or Hispanic, is close to 200 million views on Netflix, confirming the curiosity of the public towards a real and morbid news story, which still made the families of the numerous victims protest. The true crime of Ryan Murphy, an expert on American horrors in special offers, tells us in 10 episodes the life of Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal from Milwaukee who in the 90s dismembered, in the true sense of the word, photographed, ate at least 17 boys of early age. If we add the fact that Jeffrey was gay and that the LGBTQIA + tag was removed from the show, the computation of the protests increases.

The series that begins with Jeffrey’s arrest, after yet another attempt at seduction-murder, sparing nothing from the atrocities committed, even a meal with liver or spleen in butter, is also the story of a profound neurosis that pervades an unfortunate American family, with the neurotic mother running away and the father who chooses another, after having taught and shared with his son the art of quartering animals as a Sunday sport. So it’s no wonder that the police, when they finally enter the house of terror in 1991, a room in an ordinary people’s apartment building, find nude photos, a severed head in the fridge, a pair of genitals in the freezer, a skeleton. in the drawers of the dresser and a barrel of acid.

Finally they send him to trial and they give him a series of well-deserved life sentences, almost a thousand years in prison which he will not do because he will be killed by another prisoner, so he doesn’t even have time to reread the newly found Bible. The controversial relationships with his father and grandmother who, poor thing, host him and then go mad are well told; the psychoanalytic part, somewhat wholesale, is highlighted, even if two thirds of the series are dedicated to the repetition of atrocious crimes and, in fact, serials born in gay bars and saunas: the bite in clubs, drugs, the disembowelments. Very good Evan Thomas Peters, with his glasses that today are worth a treasure as a vintage object of crime, completely apathetic and overthinking, also detached from the blood that drips around him and sometimes drinks with gusto: the actor was in “X men” , in “American horror story” and won an Emmy for “Murder in Easttown”, but here his presence-absence reaches a peak of unspoken madness that does not leave indifferent in the hell of a psychosis put too long in parentheses.

And here are the other criticisms: the cops were so inattentive why were they black and gay? Their business. Two in uniform are suspended but then immediately welcomed back, their negligence is only hypothesized even if the character of the neighbor (Niecy Nash) has every reason to protest, not only for the bad smell that comes from the room next to her. After all, the series, well done and contiguous to horror cinema, touches some nerves still uncovered and speaks of real and really suffering people, who today are stabbed in the most cherished memories. The father (good Richard Jenkins) is hasty in conclusions in blaming the loneliness of the son, and perhaps the anesthesia for a hernia operation undergone as a child, the truth is that in the phenomenology of a monster of such magnitude there is a margin of mystery that no one will ever be able to explain.

Murphy does not justify, mind you (there is also a young deaf-mute victim, a moment of pathos), investigates without neglecting anything and every now and then gives a voice to the victims and relatives, engaging a classic flashback montage a little worn by use but always effective in cases such as this. If anything, it is Reverend Jesse Jackson who explains how the “case of Jeffrey is a metaphor for the social ills that plague our nation.” The white, blond killer is about to organize his redemption in the cell when another neurotic slaughters his throat, after being thrown out in the past as undesirable from both the school and the army. Whose fault is it? The question mark remains, even about the killer ‘s clouded and out of order conscience. However the series works, it alternates uncommon directors such as Gregg Araki and Jennifer Lynch, as well as Murphy himself, accustomed to deviations of every order and degree and it is with this nightmare that runs after us in the night that we break the records of the platforms.