Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, “The Man in Apt. 213” Review
5/10
A man in a Milwaukee apartment building in 1991. A neighbor who has been complaining about the smell for months. A young man who leaves the apartment and comes back. Police who arrive twice and do not look.
The 5 is a genuinely split rating and I want to be clear about why. The episode is competently constructed, the performance is precise, the point of view choice is the correct one, and the series became the second most watched thing on its platform that year while victims’ relatives were saying publicly that they had not been told.
That combination is the subject of this review, because it is the central question in this whole category and this is the clearest example of it available.
The Point of View Is Right
The opening episode is told substantially from Glenda Cleveland’s perspective, the neighbor who reported the smell, the noise and the disturbance repeatedly and was ignored.
That is the correct structural decision and the strongest thing in the hour. A story about this case is a story about institutional failure, and putting a Black woman who was repeatedly disbelieved by Milwaukee police at the center makes the argument without stating it.
Niecy Nash is very good and the character is written with restraint. She complains, she is polite, she is dismissed, she complains again, and the episode accumulates the pattern instead of dramatizing a confrontation.
The real Glenda Cleveland died in 2011 and the series compresses her with a neighbor who lived in the same building, which is a documented alteration. It is a small change and it is the kind that accumulates into a work nobody in it would recognize.
The May 1991 sequence is the material that justifies the series existing. A fourteen-year-old boy escapes, is found in the street, and is returned to the apartment by police officers who accept the explanation of the man standing next to him.
Choose the point of view that makes the argument. A story told from the neighbor’s position is about a system, and one told from the killer’s is about a person. The first is almost always the more useful book and almost never the one that sells.
Accumulate instead of escalate when the subject is being ignored. Five small dismissals establish a pattern that one large confrontation would convert into a single event.
A documented institutional failure needs no dramatic heightening. The record here is worse than anything a writer would invent.
Peters Is Excellent and That Is a Problem
Evan Peters plays Dahmer with a specific flatness, a slow speech pattern, a physical awkwardness, and almost no charisma at all, which is the correct reading of the record.
It is a disciplined performance and it won awards, and the acclaim is the mechanism this review is concerned with. A performance this good makes the person watchable, and watchability is the thing a work about real victims has to account for.
Compare what Henry does with the same problem. That film gives its performer no charm to work with at all and no scenes designed to showcase him, which is a structural refusal instead of a performance choice. This series gives Peters showcase material because showcase material is what a lead performance in a prestige series receives.
That is not a criticism of the actor. It is an observation about what the form requires and what the form’s requirements do to a subject like this.
The Families
Relatives of several victims stated publicly after release that they had not been contacted, that they had not consented, and that seeing dramatizations of their family members’ deaths was retraumatizing.
One relative described watching an actor perform her own recorded courtroom statement, close to verbatim, which she had not been asked about and did not know was in the series. That is a specific and documented objection and it is not a matter of interpretation.
The legal position is that this material is public record and no permission is required. The ethical position is a separate question and the series answered it by proceeding. Those two things being different is the entire issue with this category of work.
The victims in this episode are named, depicted, and given some interiority, which is more than Extremely Wicked manages. It is also more exposure of real people’s final hours than that film attempts, which is the trade the series made.
When you use real victims, the absence of a legal requirement to ask is not the same as there being no reason to. The practical question for any writer is whether you would be willing to show the work to the people in it before publication. If not, you already know the answer.
Giving a victim interiority is better than reducing them to a name, and it is not a substitute for consent from the people who loved them.
Ask what the work gives them. If the honest answer is visibility they did not request, in a form they cannot correct, the calculation is not favorable.
It Is Well Made
The production is precise. Milwaukee in 1991 is rendered specifically, the apartment is claustrophobic and correct, and the direction refuses to stylize anything.
The sound design is the most effective element. The building is audible throughout, neighbors, a drill, a television through a wall, and the horror of the episode is that all of this was happening inside a building where everybody could hear.
The smell is the other detail the episode is unflinching about. Months of complaints, an explanation involving a freezer, a landlord who accepts it, and a building full of people who knew perfectly well that something was wrong and were repeatedly told by somebody in a position of authority that it was nothing that any of them needed to worry about.
The structure moves between May 1991 and July 1991 and the movement is controlled. The audience knows what the police visit will produce and watches it happen anyway, which is the correct use of a non-linear arrangement.
Very little violence is depicted in this episode specifically. The series becomes more explicit later and the opener is restrained, which makes it the strongest hour and also the one that recruits an audience for the rest.
That is worth stating as a structural observation. A restrained opening episode followed by nine increasingly explicit ones is a recruitment pattern, and anybody who watched the first hour on the strength of its argument about policing was delivered somewhere else.
What It Was For
The series was an enormous commercial success, was widely discussed, and produced a public conversation about whether it should have been made, which is now part of its record.
Two arguments are made in its defense and both are worth stating. The first is that it foregrounds police failure and racism in a way most true crime does not. That is true of this episode specifically and becomes less true across the ten. The second is that dramatization reaches people documentary does not. That is also true and it is an argument about scale instead of about right.
Against those is the simplest objection, which is that the people depicted did not agree and their families said so clearly and publicly and were not answered. No argument about institutional critique resolves that, because a work can make a good argument and still have taken something from somebody.
The 5 is the honest number for a work where the execution is genuinely good and the foundation is genuinely contested. Anything higher would be praising the craft while ignoring what it was applied to, and anything lower would pretend the craft is not there.
A work can be well made and should not exist, and those two assessments do not cancel. Reviewing honestly means holding both. The temptation is to resolve the tension by finding the craft worse than it is, which is dishonest, or by treating the ethics as somebody else’s department, which is evasion.
Commercial success is the least relevant fact about whether something should have been made and is the only one the industry records.
For your own work, the question arrives earlier than you expect. Anybody writing memoir, family history or true events will face a version of it, and the decision is made before the first draft instead of after.
Should you watch Dahmer – Monster?
Watch the first episode and understand what you are participating in. It is the best hour of the ten, it puts the ignored neighbor at the center where she belongs, and it dramatizes the last hours of named people whose families said publicly that nobody asked them.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists