At one point, the producers of Sharp Objects had planned to adapt Gillian Flynn’s 2006 debut novel as a feature film, and the eight-episode TV-series version premiering Sunday on HBO (seven episodes of which were available for review) makes that initial instinct seem like the smart one. The story of a crime reporter returning to her Missouri hometown to investigate the murders of two teenage girls drags tediously over the course of its initial episodes, only gaining momentum as it gets closer to its conclusion. The lead performance by Amy Adams as troubled reporter Camille Preaker keeps the show mostly watchable, but it’s a chore to get through the dead-end subplots and the slow trickle of narrative developments that surround her.
Camille herself is a bit of a prestige-TV cliché, although Adams makes her into more than the sum of her flaws. After escaping her overbearing and possibly abusive mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson) and moving from the small town of Wind Gap to the comparatively big city of St. Louis, Camille is still a serious alcoholic, almost never seen without a “water bottle” full of vodka in her hand, and she’s coming off a stint in rehab for long-term issues with self-harm. So sending her back to the source of all her trauma is probably not as helpful as her avuncular editor (Miguel Sandoval) seems to think it is.
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Once in Wind Gap, Camille moves back into her childhood bedroom in her wealthy family’s sprawling estate, despite her antagonistic relationship with her mother, and she connects with Amma (Eliza Scanlen), the teenage half-sister she never really knew. Camille had another younger half-sister, Marian, when she was a kid, but Marian died young of an unspecified illness, a tragedy that has haunted Camille and her family ever since.
Amma is a bit of a contradiction, acting sweet and childlike (playing with dolls, wearing modest sundresses) at home with Adora, and then drinking, smoking and flirting when she’s out with her friends. She both idolizes and antagonizes Camille, who isn’t sure whether her sister needs saving or stopping.
When Camille first gets to town, one young girl has been murdered and a second is missing, but the body of the second girl soon turns up, gruesomely mutilated and displayed in a manner common to TV serial killers. Naturally, nearly everyone is a suspect, especially the father of the first victim and the brother of the second, and Camille hooks up with Richard Willis (Chris Messina), a detective from Kansas City who’s been brought in to help with the investigation and is the only other person in town not caught up in the local gossip mill.
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It’s easy to see that Camille and Richard’s relationship will soon become more than friendly, and it’s also not hard to see that most of the early leads in the case will turn out to be red herrings. Very little progress gets made on any front, though, for quite some time, and while showrunner Marti Noxon and director Jean-Marc Vallée (who helmed all eight episodes) create a thick atmosphere of ominous Southern gothic, it’s not quite engaging enough to make up for the meager plotting and elliptical character development.
As he did on the far superior Big Little Lies, Vallée uses fragmented flashbacks to slowly fill in back story, particularly incidents from Camille’s volatile childhood and her time in rehab. The use of quick cuts is intricate, layered and often bracing, and at best Vallée manages to deliver important background information with uncommon elegance, without resorting to clunky exposition. At the same time, the lyrical repetition of certain images that worked so well in Big Little Lies here comes off mostly as just repetitive, over-emphasizing the same pivotal moments once they’ve been clearly conveyed.
While Big Little Lies’ vibrant characters, clever dialogue and fantastic performances transcended its murder-mystery structure, Objects lands closer to other, more mundane small-town murder-mystery series like Broadchurch or The Sinner, with a grim, humorless style and a self-importance that approaches the levels of fellow prestige HBO crime drama True Detective at its worst. With a central mystery that’s intimately entwined with the lead character’s exploration of her own rocky past, and a female detective protagonist returning to her insular hometown, Objects also recalls Jane Campion’s more effective Top of the Lake, and much of Adams’ performance here is comparable to Elisabeth Moss’ masterful work as a similar character in that series.
Fans of the audacious twists and metafictional elements of Flynn’s Gone Girl (both the book and the David Fincher-directed 2014 movie) may be disappointed to find a more conventional psychological thriller here, one that throws in some pretty overwrought plot developments when the story finally reaches its climax. Camille isn’t as compelling or unique a character as Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, and her story fits a little too well with the current trend of overly serious, slow-burn prestige TV. Sharp Objects opens with the promise of something unique, but too often plays like a mediocre imitation.