FAMILY VALUES

Long before the deplorables elected Donald Trump, “family values” was the rallying cry of America’s conservatives. But as Hotstar’s incisive Sharp Objects points out, the family can be stultifying and its “values” are most often censorious judgements.

Based on a novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl et al), the eightepisode series is American Gothic as well as a whodunit—complete with an eerie mansion and dysfunctional family worthy of Edgar Allan Poe or Flannery O’Connor.

Journalist Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is compelled to return to Wind Gap, the rural Missouri town where she grew up, to report on a possible serial killer preying on adolescent girls—the ultimate violation of the family. However, it soon becomes clear that small-town America is rotten to the core. The oft-uttered “Bless your heart” is not kindness but a passive aggressive f— you. Every word out of Camille’s mother’s mouth is a criticism, and her pathological obsession with appearances hides another unpleasant truth: The family empire is an industrialised pig slaughterhouse.

The primary thrill of the show— and it is thrilling, though meditative—is Camille’s investigation. But the probing into the fissures of American society is compelling, too. Just as the deplorables in the heartland fear the destruction of their “way of life” by an assertion of gay and brown people, the series repeatedly drives home, the liberals who escape to the city are repulsed and terrified by their own origins.

The novel on which the series is based is less sophisticated than Flynn’s Gone Girl—which had a clever viciousness, reminiscent of Lionel Shriver. But from the first image of young Camille rolling effortlessly through a perfect idyll on her roller skates, it’s clear that Sharp Objects gains both style and substance from the cinematic treatment.

Like other content acquired from HBO—Big Little Lies and

The Night Of, as well as Game of Thrones—it’s another strong argument for shelling out for a Hotstar subscription.

—Jason Overdorf