Dear Mr Gacy

Writer-director Svetozar Ristovski won two awards for his first movie, Joy of Life, a 2001 documentary made in his native Macedonia. His debut drama, Mirage (2004), also set in war-ravaged Macedonia, was another festival winner. In 2010, his third feature was a Canadian made-for-TV movie, Dear Mr Gacy. Based on a novelised memoir, The Last Victim, by lawyer Jason Moss, the screenplay portrays the evolving relationship between John Wayne Gacy, a convicted American serial killer and Moss, then a criminology student.

Twice married and the father of two, Gacy drugged, raped and killed (many by asphyxiation) 33 young men and teenagers between 1972 and 1978, burying many of them in lye in his Chicago house's crawl-space. Dubbed "The Killer Clown" by the media, Gacy created a clown character for charity appearances. He was one of five mass killers Moss corresponded with for his thesis, employing the be-friending subterfuge of adopting a personality based on those of the killers' victims.

In 1994, in a real-life drama akin to that of Hannibal Lecter, Gacy agreed to meet Moss and provoked the student into attacking him, stressing the similarity of their personalities. A few days later, after 14 years on Death Row, he was executed by lethal injection. Moss, who spitefully revealed his duplicity to Gacy, obtained his degree, got married and, according to end credits, committed suicide for unstated reasons in 2006.

William Forsythe, a busy American actor (123 credits) often cast in villainous roles, portrays Gacy's menacing nature convincingly, but lacks the clownish avuncular charm the real Gacy demonstrates in a photograph shown with the end credits. His prey must have felt safe with him, but no one would with this actor's representation. His Gacy is a self-assertive gay-hating alpha male, not a manipulative self-disguised paedophile.

Similarly, the teenage naivety of Moss is not captured by his namesake Canadian actor Jesse Moss, another busy actor (mostly in TV). The student's psychotic character and egomania are signposted but his troubled relationships with family and girlfriend are unclear, and his willingness to follow Gacy's guidance in his city's sensationalised homosexual underworld is inexplicable.

Much of the screenplay dramatises the correspondence between the two, during the last months of Gacy's life. It's hard to believe that they trusted each other's words, and even harder to accept that two warders left them alone in an interview room and countenanced Gacy "getting his rocks off" for the last time. Moss's widow reportedly approved the screenplay, and it may therefore have avoided some truths that better explain Moss's character. Gacy remains an inexplicably amoral caricature of evil.