Entertainment

‘Sharp Objects’ Cuts Slow but Deep

“Sharp Objects” is about a murder case, but Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is the real mystery.

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By
James Poniewozik
, New York Times

“Sharp Objects” is about a murder case, but Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is the real mystery.

Camille, a wayward, self-destructive newspaper reporter in St. Louis, gets an assignment that she’s particularly close to: the murder of one young girl and the disappearance of another in Wind Gap, the small town Camille fled years ago. Her editor (Miguel Sandoval) hopes she’ll find a sense of purpose as much as a prizewinning story.

She arrives back home carrying a bag of candy bars and vodka bottles, as well as a childhood’s worth of bad memories. Images of the past — a sister who died young, her distant mother, the town’s foreboding woods — flicker up in the middle of scenes, as if Camille’s head can’t contain them.

“Sharp Objects,” a mesmerizing eight-episode series beginning Sunday on HBO, is not the gothic crime thriller you might first suspect — at least not mainly. Instead, the show’s attention is drawn backward to Camille’s injuries, emotional, physical and self-inflicted. (The title alludes to her habit of cutting words into her flesh, leaving her body a dictionary of scars.)

Camille returns to the stately, rambling home of her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), whose greeting is icy enough to chill a julep: “The house is not up to par for visitors.” Their history is being repeated in miniature by Camille’s young half sister, Amma (a captivating Eliza Scanlen), who is demure (like Adora) at home but wild and rebellious (like Camille) with her friends.

Wind Gap is a particularly southern-inflected part of Missouri; one episode turns on “Calhoun Day,” a local Civil War commemoration sympathetic to the Confederacy. It seems like the kind of small town God puts on Earth for people to be murdered in; the air is full of humidity, suspicion and gossip.

Richard Willis (Chris Messina), a detective from Kansas City, arrives to help investigate, but finds his questions ignored by the local police, who’d rather peg a likely suspect — in this case John (Taylor John Smith), one victim’s brother — and move on.

There’s no cat-and-mouse game going on, no taunts from a genius criminal. “Sharp Objects” instead relies on internal drama and a transfixing Adams, who lays Camille’s ragged soul bare with sardonicism and self-loathing. (Wind Gap, she tells her editor, is divided between “your old money and your trash,” and she herself is “trash, from old money.”)

“Sharp Objects” was adapted by Marti Noxon from the novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), and it’s as apt a pairing of producer and material as you’ll come by. Noxon has made a specialty, in series like “Dietland” and “UnREAL,” of injured, raw-nerve women whom she draws with a therapist’s empathy and a dissector’s acuity. (It’s too bad there was already a TV series named “Damages”; damage is Noxon’s great subject.)

The visual sensibility, meanwhile, comes from the director Jean-Marc Vallée, who conjured a different sort of dream world last year in “Big Little Lies” — that one polished and deceivingly perfect, this one narcotic and suggestive of rot.

As in “Big Little Lies,” the soundtrack relies on diegetic music — if you hear a song, it’s because someone has the radio on or has dropped the needle on a vinyl record. The songs (“It’s Too Late,” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”) waft through dive bars and historic homes, giving both characters and setting a melancholic, last-call feel.

One particular motif has Camille driving around town, chunking the same Led Zeppelin tape into her car stereo. Over and over, the opening notes of the band’s “In the Evening” hang in the air, sounding an unresolved tension, as Camille is stuck in the loop of her own past, unmoored in time. The contemporary period cues — a Barack Obama poster, a cracked iPhone — are few, as if to say that we could be in any year of Camille’s life, or every year.

The central family dynamics, especially between Camille and Adora, are more involving than the peripheral Wind Gap characters, who tend toward sad stock types. (Elizabeth Perkins does have fun as Jackie, a boozy faded flower who drawls lines like “It’s hotter than a whore in church.”)

“Sharp Objects” is not built as a jigsaw-puzzle-style whodunit; it’s more a meticulously constructed dollhouse, a recurring image in the series. The story does take a sharp and surprising late turn toward a thriller plot resolution. (HBO sent critics seven of eight episodes, and they end on a doozy of a moment.)

But the real reason to soak in “Sharp Objects” is to watch Camille sink deeper into her history, even as this comes to seem a worse and worse idea. In a late episode, a man apologizes for something terrible he did to her when she was young, and she tells him: “Just forget about it, all right? I have.”

In truth, Camille is nothing but memory. The past is written on her skin.

Additional Information:

‘Sharp Objects’

Sunday on HBO

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