Cast: Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, Eliza Scanlen, Matt Craven, Henry Czerny
Genre: Crime, drama, mystery
Sharp Objects is HBO’s latest limited series from Dietland creator Marti Noxon and Jean-Marc Vallée, and based on a novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) who also executive produces the series.
Amy Adams plays Camille Preaker, a journalist for the St. Louis Chronicle, who returns to the hometown she ran from to pursue a story about two missing girls, one her editor Curry (Miguel Sandoval) hopes may inspire prize-worthy coverage. And her presence agitates the place as much as the crime she’s looking into. Curry seems to intend it as a gesture of compassion, an assignment that will give her the chance to exorcise some childhood demons that he intuits plague her.
She is an independent, unmarried woman in a “traditional” small Southern town. She uses sarcasm to deflect her pain and drinks too much to evade. Camille may be incorrigible, but the show presents her looking for self-destruction as a natural response to so much accumulated trauma—not only the loss and the violence she’s endured, but her mother’s indifference to all of it.
The murder mystery is, so far, subordinate to that of Camille’s psyche, but the one is set fair to help resolve the other as we move through the next seven parts of the series. Camille is sensitive to the world around her. She’s trying to understand a story that is complicated by the fact that every location in Wind Gap is pulling her into a past she would rather avoid.
Adams is amazing: the sadness behind her eyes is palpable as Camille struggles to go through the motions of daily life. The rest of the cast is great too, especially Patricia Clarkson, as Camille’s chilly mother, and Eliza Scanlen, as the teenage half sister whom Camille doesn’t know. Also the huge collection of actors both well-known (Elizabeth Perkins, Chris Messina, etc.) and less well-known (Sydney Sweeney, recently of The Handmaid’s Tale; Taylor John Smith).
Sharp Objects is a great-looking production but it’s Camille and Adams that will keep you coming back for eight weeks to watch.
> Mar MartÃnez
Sharp Objects – Review
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