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 don’t look.
The 5 is a split rating, and the split is the reason for it. 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 hadn’t been told.
That combination is the central question in this whole category, and this is the clearest example of it available. I came away from the hour impressed and uneasy in about equal measure. I admire the craft, I think the choice of whose story to tell is right, and I still don’t like what the series did with people who never agreed to be in it.
The Point of View Is Right
The opening episode is told considerably from Glenda Cleveland’s perspective, the neighbor who reported the smell, the noise and the disturbance repeatedly and was ignored. That’s 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 Milwaukee police repeatedly disbelieved at the center makes the argument without stating it.
Niecy Nash is very good, and she’s the best argument for watching the first hour.
The character is written with restraint. She complains, she’s polite, she’s dismissed, she complains again, and the episode accumulates the pattern instead of dramatizing a confrontation. Watching her get brushed off over and over made me angrier than anything else in the episode.
The real Glenda Cleveland died in 2011 and the series compresses her with a neighbor who lived in the same building. That’s a documented alteration. It’s a small change and it’s 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 police officers who accept the explanation of the man standing next to him return him to the apartment.
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’s worse than anything a writer would invent.
Peters Is Excellent and That Is a Problem
Evan Peters plays Dahmer with flatness, a slow speech pattern, a physical awkwardness, and almost no charisma at all. That’s the correct reading of the record.
It’s 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 show him off. That’s 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.
Peters is doing his job, and doing it well. The trouble comes from what the form requires and what those requirements do to a subject like this. He’s so good that I caught myself watching him the way I’d watch any prestige lead, and that reaction is the thing I object to.
The Families
Relatives of several victims stated publicly after release that they hadn’t been contacted, that they hadn’t 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 hadn’t been asked about and didn’t know was in the series. That’s a documented objection and it’s not a matter of interpretation. A woman sat through the worst day of her life once, in a courtroom, and the production restaged it without picking up the phone, which I can’t get past. Whatever the series says about Milwaukee police, that decision was cheap, and it colors every good thing I have to say about the craft.
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. That’s more than Extremely Wicked manages. It’s also more exposure of real people’s final hours than that film attempts. That’s the trade the series made.
When you use real victims, the absence of a legal requirement to ask isn’t the same as there being no reason to. The practical question for any writer is whether you’d 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’s not a substitute for consent from the people who loved them.
Ask what the work gives them. If the answer is visibility they didn’t request, in a form they can’t correct, the calculation isn’t favorable.
It Is Well Made
The production is precise. Milwaukee in 1991 is rendered in detail, the apartment is claustrophobic and correct, and the direction refuses to stylize anything.
The sound design is the most effective element, and it’s what I admire most in the hour. 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 somebody in a position of authority who repeatedly told them 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. That’s the correct use of a non-linear arrangement. This episode depicts very little violence. The series becomes more explicit later and the opener is restrained. That makes it the strongest hour and also the one that recruits an audience for the rest.
That’s 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. That’s 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 doesn’t. That’s true of this episode and becomes less true across the ten. The second is that dramatization reaches people documentary doesn’t. That’s also true and it’s an argument about scale instead of about right.
Against those is the simplest objection: the people depicted didn’t agree and their families said so clearly and publicly and weren’t 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 real number for a work where the execution is good and the foundation is contested. Anything higher would be praising the craft while ignoring what it was applied to, and anything lower would pretend the craft isn’t there.
A work can be well made and shouldn’t exist, and those two assessments don’t cancel. Reviewing fairly 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. That’s 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 if you want to understand what you’re participating in.
It’s the best hour of the ten, it puts the ignored neighbor at the center where she belongs, and I respect it for that. It also dramatizes the last hours of named people whose families said publicly that nobody asked them, and that’s why I can’t go above a 5. The craft pulls the number up, the treatment of those families pulls it back down, and 5 is where those two pulls meet for me.
