HBO’s 8-Episode Southern Gothic Thriller Is Still a Masterpiece Almost a Decade Later

It shouldn’t be too hard to believe there was a time before and after Gone Girl, the novel-turned-movie that upended how women are treated in crime fiction thanks to author Gillian Flynn, who created the iconic and deadly Amy Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike in the film adaptation. The book and David Fincher’s film are not standard murder mysteries, and the author did the same in her 2006 debut novel, Sharp Objects, which became a 2018 HBO miniseries.

The murder mystery is a jumping-off point before the story gets more disturbing. All the episodes are directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who brings his atmospheric visual style that is rounded out with a terrific cast, led by a devastating Amy Adams. Before Amy Dunne’s manipulation and rage, there was Camille Preaker, who gets swallowed up in a personal hell.

What Is ‘Sharp Objects’ About?

Camille Preaker (Adams) returns to her childhood hometown of Wind Gap, located in Missouri’s “Bootheel,” a place she has done her best to avoid, but as a reporter, Camille is assigned to write about the murder of a young girl that has gone unsolved. She sees old classmates who haven’t lost their “mean girl” personalities and gets close to the detective who is trying to find the killer at large, but the return home is further strained when Camille sees her family again, including her distant mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), and wild child Amma (Eliza Scanlen), who is Camille’s half-sister. Tension builds as Camille becomes increasingly haunted by her past, especially in remembering the younger sister she lost during her childhood.

Sharp Objects is a Southern Gothic that is as deadly as it is sweaty, where the Missouri setting can unleash the humidity off the screen. There is a slow-burn pacing across the eight episodes, and while it may be too slow for some viewers, the pacing is deliberate, as Adams’ emotionally troubled reporter gets wrapped up in the dark clutches of Wind Gap. To help with the patience of the storytelling, there are unique touches that would surely keep viewers engaged.

‘Sharp Objects’ Has Beautiful and Creepy Opening Credits

Image via Anne Marie Fox / ©HBO / Courtesy: Everett Collection

The theme song that plays during the title sequence is “Dance and Angela,” a song taken from A Place in the Sun about a tragic love story. The song changes depending on who or what an episode is about, with renditions made to evoke a thematic feeling; there is a hip-hop version for youthfulness, and another toward the series’ end sounds darker and rumbling as sinister truths break through with no turning back. The title sequence lulls the viewers into the miniseries’ tone, and just like other HBO shows such as The Sopranos and True Detective, as unforgettable as the music is, so are the visuals. No one should want to hit the “skip” button.

Scenes fade in and out, some merge with others, all of them creating a world Sharp Objects will enter and depicting Wind Gap as a place that is sprawling and constricting, decadent and ruined, like the best kind of Southern Gothic stories do. Of the images seen, there is blood dripping, a young girl smiling on a swing, a fence of barbed wire, and a couple dancing. By the time the first episode plays, there will surely be something else that becomes quickly apparent to someone watching.

‘Sharp Objects’ Doesn’t Have a Typical Score, Either

Image via HBO

When Camille or anyone else heads outside or stays indoors, music is important to get into their headspace, but there is a notable lack of a score. The creative decision to keep the music diegetic — music that exists in the show’s world — feels isolating, and a song that plays can be an attempt to drown out the quiet of rural life. It feels personal too; the sound is dim when characters put on a pair of headphones, and it gets louder and crisp for the audience only when the character can hear it just as well. The sound design can then get unsettling when it’s messed with; a highlight of this is when Camille falls under a bad influence.

High on ecstasy, Camille rollerskates through Wind Gap’s main street, reliving her childhood, but with the potential of a bad trip slowly threatening to ruin the mood. Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” blends into “Ghost” by The Acid, a song that has a personal connection to Camille, and makes for an eerie remix where the echoes of one are beneath the other. When there isn’t a needle drop, a constant hum of cicadas is heard, the small town depleted of the mundane loudness of a city. Without relying on the supernatural, Wind Gap still feels like a haunted place, where town lore includes violence against women that spans decades and where there is a favorite scary story the kids share about a dangerous “Woman in White” who lives in the woods. On Sharp Objects, the diegetic and ambient sound is a fascinating way to get inside someone’s head or develop the world, but it’s not the only method.

‘Sharp Objects’ Is the Last Project by Director Jean-Marc Vallée

Image via HBO

There is a paranoid visual style where the residents of Wind Gap are often voyeurs of each other. In a crowded scene early on, Camille may look over at someone, and the camera then switches to the perspective of someone else keeping an eye on Camille. Everyone is eager to know everyone else’s secrets in this town. There is a murder mystery that needs solving, after all, and the suspect list has plenty of names to choose from, but the editing is one of the best experiences on this show, where memories appear as non-linear scenes, and sometimes they don’t get pieced together until episodes later.

It’s a filmmaking tool that the late Jean-Marc Vallée knew how to wield well in his projects like Wild and Season 1 of Big Little Lies, a cinematic invitation to get closer to the characters. At times, Camille’s memories invade the present, and elsewhere, it seems as if she’s walking through the past. All eight episodes of Sharp Objects are directed by the late Vallée, whose sudden death in 2021 made this miniseries his last directorial work, where his fluid directing and editing conjure the intoxicating allure of the Southern Gothic genre.

The Women of ‘Sharp Objects’ Are Monsters, Hurting, or Both

Image via HBO

Sydney Sweeney has a small role as Alice, a roommate during Camille’s stay at a mental health clinic, and despite the age gap, they bond over their troubles until a heartbreaking outcome. Alice reminds Camille about the young sister she lost as a kid, and most of the music Camille listens to is from Alice’s playlist. Jackie (Elizabeth Perkins) is Camille’s boozy aunt, Adora’s estranged sister, who has self-medicated and becomes jovial and gossipy. “I hurt… is all,” she tells her niece, washing down a pill with a sip from a Bloody Mary. Amma, Camille’s teen half-sister, knows how to play the room, being the obedient child with her mother and a scathing figure among her friends and everyone else she wants to target. During Camille’s night out high and rollerskating, Amma tags along. In one menacing shot, Amma swoops in toward her older sister, and it’s uncertain whether she wants to hurt or hug Camille.

Then there is Adora, a regal woman who steps through her grand mansion in heels and gowns like the unofficial “queen of Wind Gap” she views herself as. She treats her husband, Alan (Henry Czerny), like a servant, matched by the romantic tension that simmers between Adora and haggard Chief Vickery (Matt Craven), who share drinks during meetings that verge on rekindling feelings they never acted upon. But Adora is not a kind woman, and her nails and stilettos are as jagged as the insults she directs at Camille. “She’s a rare rose,” Adora describes her eldest child, “but not without thorns.” While Sharp Objects has a captivating murder mystery to solve, there is another, more important mystery that needs to be unlocked: Who is Camille? Why is she self-destructive? “You’re not there to solve the mystery,” her boss Frank (Miguel Sandoval) tells her, one of the few people who genuinely care about Camille’s well-being, but he has no idea sending her back home will be a critical error.

Gillian Flynn Creates Another Great Character in Camille Preaker

Through Amy Adams’ portrayal, Camille is tired and quiet on the exterior, while her interior is bursting with pain and fear. She drinks heavily, armed with water bottles that she has refilled with vodka. Adams has the talent to deliver the internal monologues from Gillian Flynn’s novel, but those are left out; instead, the editing does the work as broken memories are pieced together, whether she wants them to be or not. There are hidden Easter eggs in each episode where simple words are carved into various settings (a car, a desk) without calling attention to themselves, and these are words (vanish, dirt, cherry) that are on Camille’s body, which she has cut into her skin as a form of self-harm. In slowly understanding her, Amy Adams brings to life Gillian Flynn’s tragic antihero.

Adams is terrific in the role, as the actress disappears and Camille takes over. There are so many car rides to get from one place in Wind Gap to another, and with Camille’s declining mental health, Adams seems drained. One reason she is moving is because of muscle memory; her foot is on the gas, and she’s drifting onto the next location. There are lots of fans placed in old homes without AC units, spinning mindlessly to cool down nearby occupants. They are symbolic of the cycle of violence that is prevalent in Wind Gap, a small town that is a hostile environment where murdered young girls are not the only casualties. When the miniseries begins to crack open the worst memories and horrible truths, Camille verges on falling apart completely, but she’s a survivor too and even if she denies it, she fights like hell to keep going.

Of the three Gillian Flynn adaptations, Gone Girl is her most popular, although her second novel, Dark Places, didn’t earn the best movie adaptation in 2015, despite having Charlize Theron in the starring role. Until Flynn writes her next book, and it inevitably gets the film or TV treatment, the author’s first novel remains an underrated Gothic thriller, both on the page and on the screen. Sharp Objects creeps up onto the viewer, slow and sticky like molasses, and will be tough to forget long after the final episode concludes.

Sharp Objects is streaming on Max.