Sharp objects
Amy Adams turns to telly.
beneath the torrents of arterial blood, David Fincher’s ravishing adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl took a razor to the conformist expectations heaped on girls. Similar themes and methods elevate HBO’s adap of Flynn’s debut novel above TV’s crime pack. Co-written by Flynn with showrunner Marti Noxon, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Big Little Lies), Sharp Objects is a seductive slow-burner with performances to relish.
First glance suggests another
TV tale of murdered daughters and community trauma, set to alt-tasteful music (Led Zep, M. Ward). “Dead girls, everywhere,” sighs a drunk old dame, callously. But early shots of the gossipy town of Wind Gap, Missouri, and the taut-with-repression mirrored face of journalist Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) suggest keener riffs on how environment can scar identities. And bodies: a self-harmer, Camille’s wounds make grim reading.
Dispatched by her editor to investigate the murder of one girl and disappearance of another in Wind Gap,
where she was raised, Camille moves back in with her mother, Adora Crellin. Played by Patricia Clarkson as a terrifically toxic cocktail of pastel, poise and poison, Adora is a passiveaggressive control freak who just wants her daughters to be “nice”. And if they’re not? Well, now look, you’ve made her ill.
Camille’s relations with Adora, her teenage step-sister Amma (Eliza Scanlen) and the memory of a late sister form parallel plotlines to the distressing main story, linked via dreamy, colour-coded visual blurs of flashback, fantasy and reality. After Big Little Lies’ slickly sun-baked mysteries, Vallée proves equally adept at navigating psycho-gothic depths. Adora’s house is coffin-like; inside, a duplicate dollhouse’s suggestion of suffocating micro-management echoes the interiors of Hereditary.
As Camille did, Amma and other local girls respond to this suppression by (roller) skating off the rails. Booze and pills are necked giddily – and it emerges that one “angelic” murdered girl hoarded big, scary spiders in jars. Adora would not approve…
The extremes of repression and rebellion build to grim revelations with captivating control, albeit very little warmth. As for why Camille puts up with Adora, Adams is amazing enough to sell that nagging headscratcher. Dressed in head-to-toe black to hide her scars, she reconciles the contrasts between expression and reserve effortlessly. For high-grade pulp TV, Sharp Objects perhaps risks moving too slowly. But Adams hits the deep, layered truth-notes needed to keep us hooked on every twist. Kevin Harley