User reviews

The reviews that rate this series poorly, (or comment on how slow it is) likely thought this was going to be a murder mystery. It is about murder, but the "who-dun-it" is secondary. This is a character study in damaged human beings, how they got to that point, and the different ways it manifests in their lives. It is dark and unflinching in some places, and it is fascinating. It is also incredibly well acted. The "slow burn" pace is a dramatic marinade, allowing us to really soak in the character and absorb the experience. It makes the finale that much more impactful, and what a twisty finale it was! If you like character driven stories wrapped in a murder mystery, this will not disappoint.

Camille, who was drunk almost every hour of the day from the moment she arrived in town, tries to repress the traumas she has experienced but she is not very successful in that regard. We understand with instant flashback scenes how emotions that Camille suppressed suddenly surfaced and she can't cope with her past. The town's suc-cessful drowning atmosphere, combined with masterful work of fiction and image management and with the convincing performance of Amy Adams, turns the series into a complete mood, so to speak. With the hypnotizing music that plays in the background while watching to the series we seem to be drunk in the Wind Gap with Camille. There are great soundtracks from Led Zeppelin to The Doors, from Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash.

The scene transitions between past memories and the present are very successful. It's like the scenes are intertwined. You're not leaving the general story of the series as you watch the past memories scenes. It's very well tuned. We see that the series doesn't go on a straight timeline. The scene at the beginning of the episodes is actually the final scene. Although not in each episode, some episodes have these time shifts.

In the background of the series, the words shown for 3-4 seconds may give hints about the series. At least when you watch it carefully, it makes you think. Who knows, maybe a subliminal message. You're unlikely to guess who the killer is. Because in each section you focus on different people. Ideas may change as new details emerge. So it's a little hard to guess. Something I like about this series. Because an unpredictable series is more attractive to me.

I found the acting very good. I think Amy Adams deserves the Golden Globe award with this performance. She conveys her character's mood very well to the audience. You feel deeply the feelings of Camille. Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson are really good. I found the tension between them very good. Unfortunately, it is not possible to escape from the parents we are attached to. Camille also lives this situation deeply. I guess one of the most complicated things in life is the child-parent relationship. Eliza Scanlen who plays the character Amma is very successful. Like two separate characters in the morning and night. It's like there's someone else in Amma when it's night. Of course it is necessary to open a separate parentheses to Sophia Lillis. She performed very well.

Although the first episode starts with a slow pace, the next episodes are moving well. And it reflects thriller very well. The entire town, including the police, seems to be looking for the killer from a single perspective. It's like the killer is the whole town. I love watching horror movies but I can't say I'm scared most of the time. But in this series, there were a lot of scenes that creeped and disturbed me.

In the series the mystery of the killer is preserved until the last moment, but in the final, the series shoots the audience in the heart with a single sentences. The series manages to leave a shocking effect on viewers with its final. Sharp Objects gave the message that it wanted to give in eight episodes. I can recommend it for those who love the psychological thriller and killer themed. 9/10

Absolutely brilliant. If your looking for a happy story, look somewhere else. Very dark, very depressing, if you have it in you to watch, you get a masterfully spun story of true pain, true guilt and loss. Also a very good depiction of mental health. With a final act that is JAW dropping. I've never written a review on here, but this is a masterpiece.

Is it slow? Yes, it is! But it's also beautifully made. The characters are amazing, the acting is even better and the story is catchy. It's a mystery-drama series...it supposed to be slow, to give you time to grow with the characters, to understand every detail. It's not advertised as being the avengers...it's not an action movie...

Absolutely amazing mini series. There were times that I was confused by quick cuts to flashbacks and flashes of gruesome scenes and wondered if they'd ever make sense, but all the while I knew they would come together in the end. This was absolutely true. By the end of the series, all these loose ends were neatly tied into a present with a bow on top, and then the very last scene of the finale blew my mind. 100% would recommend watching!

I've never posted a review before but just HAD to for this. I've also never binged watched 7 hours of tv straight before. This was brilliant from the beginning to the very last credit.

If you've seen any of Adam's earlier works, this one will shock you. Her character is not charming, glowing, sweet and innocent. Her Camille is broken, confused, and in deep pain.

She has to return to her home town to cover a murder for her newspaper. In doing so, she must confront her own past, which is full of abuse, neglect, addiction, murder....

Camille has never properly confronted her past. She has drowned it through work, alcohol, and sexual obsession. Adam's performance is so nuanced, so perfect. She conveys with a glance what most actors cannot with a soliloquy.

The production is spot-on - especially the editing. Camille's past and present collide in quite breathtaking turns - moments sometimes so brief as to seem fleeting.

You'll want to give this multiple viewings... it will take you time to decipher the story, but you will love every minute of it.

A hats off to Jean Marce Vallee. This is a masterpiece. I still didn't get over from the finale. Especially from the post credits scenes. This is far better than the brilliant Big Little Lies by the same director, which was really good too. We can't really decide who did their roles best. Amy Adams or Patricia Clarkson or Eliza Scanlen. They were absolutely stunning. A must watch for all.

In an age of constant renewals and shows that refuse to bow out when they're on top, there's something to be said for the beauty of a self-contained story, well-told.

I tried to get into this , but really I found it painfully slow. This series could easily have been condensed into the first four, and not prolonged to eight episodes . I couldnt help but think that Camille's character was a bit overplayed , I mean , the drinking was a little over the top, just her whole demeaner was kind of exaggerated . And really , considering the amount that she drank , she seemed to hold it pretty well.

I found all the characters to be unlikeable and irritating , and very cliched.

The ending was completely rushed , which I found amusing , considering that the whole series dragged on forever.

And , as for " the twist " ? So mad and farfetched , so many unanswered questions , and no reasonable explanations .

All in all , a little pretentious and melodramatic .

This series has the nerve of season 1 of True Detective, the cinematography of Inception, the clipping of the Blade Runner, the grit of The Wire and the family dysfunction of Six Feet Under. It's all the good things of cinematography in one series. Great acting, suspense in every episode and a loss for it only being a miniseries.

Haunting first episode of a show that had me and my wife entranced for the full hour. The editing, cinematography (particularly the framing), mixture of original score and Led Zep songs, casting and performances were all 10/10. It's interesting that Amy Adams, the best working actress without an Oscar, might win an Emmy first if the rest of the series is any indication.

I think people are a little confused on what this show is about. It is a murder mystery, but that takes the back seat a lot of the time, and focuses more on the psychology of our characters. This is a show about trauma and the way it affects people, especially Camille (Amy Adams). It can be gory, but doesn't really show much active violence. It's thrilling, but definitely isn't action packed.

This show isn't for everyone, but there's no denying that it's extremely well made. This was Jean Marc Vallee's final completed project before his passing in late 2021. The director and assistant editor, also known for Big Little Lies season one, really knows how to tell a compelling story.

The direction is amazing, and since he has a large role in editing both shows, it has a similar editing style to Big little lies that is very effective in the demonstration of trauma. We see flashbacks in short, few second bursts that give us insight into what a character is thinking about, which lends itself for an incredible viewing experience.

If you want a dark murder mystery that puts the psyche of its characters in the drivers seat, this is for you.

Masterful in every single frame. If you liked True Detective this might appeal to you as well. If you are looking for something to restore your faith in humanity you might want to watch something else.

I love Gillian Flynn because she writes about real women. Fully fleshed out, gritty, strong, good bad and ugly, real women. I love Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson because they convey that beautifully. I was really looking forward to the start of this miniseries because I so loved the book, and so far I am not disappointed. The cinematography and score are fantastic, and the acting is superb. It is a slow burn, as it should be, and it is in equal measure tense, taught, and hauntingly beautiful. I cannot wait to watch the rest of this story unfold.

Great atmosphere and soundtrack, very similar in tone and style to Big Little Lies - also by director Jean-Marc Vallée. Amy Adams brings class and subtlety to what is not an especially original storyline (Camille, a journalist haunted by ghosts of her past returns to home town to solve murder). But excellence of execution makes this shine. Patricia Clarkson's portrayal of Camille's narcissistic, self-absorbed mother is equally effective: you'll find yourself wanting to choke her in every episode. Also so refreshing to see women's lives and stories portrayed in a non-exploitative way. Camille's struggle with alcoholism and self-harm is depicted with unblinking realism and is something many women can unfortunately relate to. Looking forward to the rest of this series, which is shaping up to be as good as season 1 of True Detective.

Dear Filmmakers:

I've noticed a trend in television shows lately: The stories are being dragged out. I'll get to the end of episode 3 or 4 and start to feel frustrated because nothing much has happened since the 1st episode. I'll check the episode list and groan that a good story is being stretched across 8-10 episodes. However I'm hooked, I need to know what happens, so I continue to watch. But I respectfully request that they be told more concisely. My family has developed a game of sorts to each give our opinion as to how many episodes the story could have actually been told in and inevitably, it is at least half. Sharp Objects is one of these shows that could have been told in half the episodes. Easily. The acting was superb, the story interesting, but the pace was slower than a Sunday afternoon.

These are good shows, i.e., Goliath (2nd season), The Sinner, The OA, Mindhunter, Lost in Space, and now Sharp Objects, just to name a few. They are worth watching, but I find them frustrating for plot points to be piecemealed out over so many hours. I'm not asking the stories be told like the fast-talking legal disclaimers at the end of an AM radio ad, but just be tightened up a bit.

Take the first season of Stranger Things, for instance. It was like an 8 hour movie where each episode advanced the story line at a very satisfying pace. I couldn't stop watching and gobbled it all up in one day. (I LOVE when all the episodes drop at once!) The first and second season of Bosch were like this as well. Bingeing at its best.

Now I know this is my opinion and others will disagree with me, but it is a trend I have noticed over the past couple of years and maybe there are others out there who have noticed it too. This is my little two cents worth.

I find it strange to ask for less of a good thing, but that's what I'm asking. I want to watch shows that make me put down my laptop and phone, to make me stop playing games or surf the internet while the show is on. I wanna have to pause to discuss what just happened and look forward to watching more. Instead, my reaction to last night's Sharp Objects was "yay, it's the last episode and we can finally get some answers". The paint has finally dried!

I sound ungrateful, I know. This show and the others I mentioned are good TV. I thank you for the excellent programming. I just want it to be a little less....stretched.

Thank you.

Although this eight-part HBO limited series has been advertised as a murder-mystery, it's really a character study, with the murder plot functioning primarily as an impetus to facilitate engagement with the characters surrounding it. Nothing wrong with that, of course; the first season of True Detective (2014) (still one of the finest seasons of TV ever made) worked as well as it did not because of the ostensible whodunnit, but because of the psychological deep-dive into its two central characters. Sharp Objects is similarly interested not in who's behind a pair of murders in a small Missouri town, but in how those murders affect a trio of women caught up in the investigation. Feminine in design rather than inherently feminist, the show is a portrait of tainted motherhood and corrupted sisterhood, and focuses on internecine inter-generational conflict, matrilineal dysfunction, and how difficult it can be to escape from past trauma. But whilst the acting is exceptional, and the show is well directed and edited, much like the first season of Big Little Lies (2017), it left me wholly unengaged, completely uninterested in any of the characters, and fighting interminable boredom for much of its eight hours (it's yet another example of one of the worst elements of Prestige TV; series which are far, far longer than they need to be).

Sharp Objects tells the story of Camille Preaker (an exceptional Amy Adams), a reporter for the St. Louis Chronicle, who is sent back to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to report on the murder of two young girls. A barely-functioning alcoholic prone to carving words into her flesh, Camille is ill-prepared for the effect Wind Gap has on her psyche. Central amongst her demons is her mother, Adora (a spectacular Patricia Clarkson), who looks down on Camille with barely-concealed disappointment. Camille is especially haunted by the memory of her younger sister Marian, who died when they were still children, but in the years since Camille moved away, Adora re-married and had another child, Amma (Eliza Scanlen, in a breakout role), who fascinates Camille with her dual personality - dutiful daughter from another era who wears elaborate dresses and plays with a doll's house, and roller-blading lollypop sucking teenage temptress.

Based on the 2006 Gillian Flynn novel, Sharp Objects was written primarily by showrunner Marti Noxon and Flynn herself, with directorial duties handled by Jean-Marc Vallée, who also helmed the aforementioned first season of Big Little Lies. Vallée was also lead editor, and this is important insofar as the editing is the show's calling card, as he attempts to draw us into Camille's psyche via fleeting snippets of childhood memories. The editing rhythms will definitely throw some people off initially, with the frequent one second (or less) cutaways recalling Oliver Stone's "horizontal editing". However, a more apt comparison would be the free-associative editing style of films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Mirror (1975), and probably the best evocation of memory ever put on screen, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Indeed, the technique is not entirely unlike Marcel Proust's use of "involuntary memory" in À la recherche du temps perdu - so, for example, adult Camille lies in bed and stares at a crack on the ceiling and when we cut back to the bed, she's a child looking at that same crack; adult Camille is shown opening a door, and we cut to child Camille entering a room; adult Camille hears a song and closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she's a child listening to the song on the radio.

This editing style inculcates us into Camille's fractured mind, whilst also hinting at the nature of her trauma, without ever being too explicitly revealing. As will be discussed in a moment, Vallée grossly overuses the technique, neutering it of its potency, but that notwithstanding, it's a good example of the importance of "show, don't tell", as well as a great example of content generating form and form simultaneously giving rise to content; the memories are always tied to Camille's fragmented psychology, with the brief snippets of recollection acting like splinters impinging on her adult existence.

Another interesting aesthetic aspect of the show is its sense of place. Taking place during a hot summer in which the entire cast are permanently sweating, one can practically feel the humidity rising from the screen and smell the pig farm on which so many of the town's people work. But it's not just the sense of tangibility; at times, Wind Gap comes across as surreal enough to be the location of a David Lynch film. The introduction to the town, for example, is a series of long tracking shots which show next-to-no people, as if the place has been abandoned. Later we see Amma and two of her friends perpetually roller-blading around town like the 21st century equivalent of the Moirai, we also meet a little boy who lives with his meth-addicted mother and who carries a gun to ensure their safety.

Thematically, the show covers a lot of ground, almost all of it tied to female experience, specifically motherhood/daughterhood. Adora is a woefully bad mother who made little secret of the fact that she preferred Marian to Camille; when Camille arrives at the house upon her return to Wind Gap, rather than be happy to see her, Adora icily tells her, "I'm afraid the house is not up to par for visitors". In a rare moment of openness, as Camille struggles to understand why Adora treats her the way she does, Adora tells her, "you can't get close. That's your father. And it's why I think I never loved you. You were born to it, that cold nature. I hope that's of some comfort to you". Later she admits that what she wanted from Camille more than anything was the one thing Camille couldn't give her - she wanted Camille to need her.

In a more general sense, the show deals with how women respond to familial trauma. It doesn't engage with feminism at a political or cultural level, but it certainly does so at a personal level, arguing that the pain experienced by abused women is just as valid as that experienced by abused men, that the manifestations of trauma can be just as catastrophic, and that the anger engendered can be just as self-destructive. We're very used to seeing stories focused on angry, damaged, hard-drinking male characters with dark backgrounds who must fight to control the violence within them, but Sharp Objects is a story focused on the female equivalent of that trope. Indeed, Wind Gap is a town where women are locked into the virtuous virgin/rampant harlot binary, a binary created by men. It's a place where a woman's worth correlates directly with her femininity, her maternal instincts, and her obedient acceptance of her place in androcentric societal structures - everything Camille is not.

However, for all that, I couldn't get into Sharp Objects, and by no means did I enjoy it. The biggest problem is the pace. Yes, I understand it's a character drama, not a plot-heavy murder-mystery, but so too was the first season of True Detective and never once did I feel that show was moving too slow. With Sharp Objects, as episode after episode after episode ended flatly, eventually I just stopped caring. Aside from a major incident in the first episode, and a couple of big reveals in the penultimate and last episodes, almost nothing happens. And that's not hyperbole, I mean it very literally. Tied to this is that the show is far, far too long. The novel is 254 pages, and could easily have been adapted in a four-episode run, but trying to stretch it out over eight (it runs 385 minutes) means that there are long periods were the narrative stops dead, with the characters not interesting enough to take up the slack. Elsewhere, the flashback editing is used so often that it loses its potency and ends up feeling like filler designed only to artificially prolong the runtime. It also starts to feel like Vallée is so in love with the technique that he's using it arbitrarily rather than in the service of character or plot. Additionally, the show abounds in clichés - from the alcoholic hard-as-nails journalist to the incompetent local police chief to the out of town detective to whom nobody listens to the gossiping women to the various suspects who are obviously red herrings. Vallée also has a tendency to overuse certain images, thus robbing them of their effectiveness - Amma and her friends roller-blading around town, Amma playing silently with her giant dollhouse, shots of the child Camille being chased through the woods by a group of jocks, shots of Camille filling a water bottle with vodka.

There's a lot to admire in Sharp Objects, but precious little to like. Although not exactly a work of post-MeToo fempowerment, it certainly has a female-centric perspective, and its examination of issues usually associated with men is interesting, saying some fascinating things about female trauma. The performances are top-notch and the editing is decent (albeit overused), but all in all, the show did little for me. I understand that it's designed holistically rather than cumulatively, and I have no problem with that. But the pace is enervating and the characters just aren't interesting enough to fill such a lengthy runtime.

The best series I've seen in years! Masterpiece!!! See until the last second. Even in the final credits.