The pressure on Sharp Objects to deliver could not be higher. Pressure to be the show of the summer, pressure to live up to the bestselling book by Gillian Flynn from which the series is based, pressure to finally get Amy Adams the awards recognition she rightfully deserves. Those high expectations are met with an enthralling show that's as much of a nuanced character study as it is a deeply disturbing exploration of violence and self-inflicted pain.
The limited series, directed by Big Little Lies' Jean-Marc Vallée, follows local newspaper reporter Camille Preaker, brought to life by Amy Adams’s quietly powerful performance, as she reluctantly heads back to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, on assignment to cover the brutal murder of one young girl and the disappearance of a second. She brings with her only a beat-up Volvo, a serious drinking problem, and a past she'd rather ignore.
Blood and scars are front and center throughout the entire show, and only in part because of the violent murders happening in the small town. Camille has spent decades cutting hundreds of words into her body as a way of coping with a traumatic childhood, and she now exerts a significant amount of energy trying to conceal what's beneath her uniform of jeans, long sleeves, and boots. While the scars have somewhat faded, the urge to cut again and the shame that comes with it definitely has not.
An obvious contributor to Camille's lack of stability is her estranged mother, Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson), who welcomes her eldest daughter home with outright disdain and all the warmth of an ice box. Every word she dismissively whispers to Camille drips with vitriol. Adora floats through the family’s secluded mansion, alternately helicopter-parenting Camille’s rebellious 13-year-old half-sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen), or mourning the death of her other daughter, Marian, which happened decades ago. Camille’s personal demons and complicated—to put it mildly—relationships with Adora and Amma are slowly exposed throughout the course of the series.
It’s hard to picture Sharp Objects being nearly as compelling without Amy Adams. She inhabits Camille so seamlessly, that it’s easy to miss all the conscious choices she’s made to make the character feel fully realised. The sadness behind her eyes is palpable as Camille struggles to go through the motions of daily life. It's not much of a stretch to predict that Adams will win an Emmy for her performance.
Behind the camera, director Jean-Marc Vallée hones in on the Southern Gothic mood Flynn created, complete with jarring flashbacks that are edited together so quickly that they’re quite literally flashes. Dingy dive bars, furiously spinning ceiling fans, and eerily silent houses fill Wind Gap, as the people that inhabit the town torture each other physically and psychologically. Patience is key as a viewer; the storylines take their time developing, borrowing a cue from the slow, Southern setting.
It would be easy for audiences to preemptively compare Sharp Objects to last summer’s massive success, Big Little Lies. The same director, the same network, a murder mystery plot, a predominantly female cast led by A-list talent, and based off a bestselling book. The production similarities are certainly there, but it does a disservice to the complexities of these narratives to brand them as similar “women’s stories.”
Where Big Little Lies offered up a glossy, aspirational exterior to mask its characters’ pain, Sharp Objects presents all the ugliness of its world right up front. Everything—from the dim lighting to the sweat-soaked wardrobes to the abandoned backroads—is a clear indicator that nothing about Camille Preaker and Wind Gap is glamorous or even remotely lighthearted. If anything, Sharp Objects feels closer in tone to the first season of HBO’s True Detective.
Book loyalists will be happy to know that the bulk of the limited series (press was able to watch seven out of the eight episodes) stays true to Flynn’s novel. It can’t hurt that Flynn herself wrote several of the episodes and served as an executive producer. Perhaps the most notable difference in the adaptation is that Detective Richard Willis, played by the always-charming Chris Messina, feels like more of a male lead counterpart to Adams’s Camille, whereas the book had him in more of a supporting, one-dimensional role seen only through Camille's perspective.
Sharp Objects marks the third screen adaptation of Flynn's work for just as many books. The film version of Gone Girl was a critical and commercial success, while the film version of Dark Places was quietly released with little fanfare. In addition to being a gifted storyteller, Flynn has built her writing career sculpting female characters who are multi-faceted and challenge the societal perceptions of how women traditionally act. Even the notion that the murderer in Sharp Objects could be a woman is a frequent discussion topic between Camille and those involved with the case—how could a woman be capable of such violence?
In a cultural landscape where women are often still relegated to being the doting, agreeable wives or the successful overachievers beloved by everyone, it’s rare to see women onscreen who are allowed to fumble through life and make ethically dubious choices the way Camille does. She's kind, but not warm. She’s smart, but not brilliant at her job. She self-medicates rather than addressing her issues in a productive manner. But she's a compelling, interesting character, and isn't that what matters? We could use more stories like hers.
Sharp Objects airs Sunday nights on HBO in the US and Monday nights on Sky Atlantic in the UK.
Elena Hilton is the assistant editor for Esquire.com, where she manages Esquire's social media and writes about culture and politics.
