Sharp Objects movie review & film summary (2018)

One of the best actresses of her generation, Amy Adams, plays Camille Preaker, a crime reporter from St. Louis who has been assigned what could be the story of her life. Knowing that her family is from the small town of Wind Gap, Missouri, her editor sends Camille down there when a young girl goes missing. It’s not just the new case but that another girl was found dead less than a year ago, all of her teeth removed before they found her body. Could there be a serial killer in Wind Gap?

To say Camille brings some baggage home to investigate the missing girls would be an understatement. She’s not long removed from a stint in a rehab center and she’s still a raging alcoholic. She replaces the H2O in her water bottles with vodka and starts most days with a swig of something alcoholic. She also has a legacy of cutting, the scars of words like “Scared” and “Vanish” etched into her skin forever. Early episodes imply that her kindly editor actually sends Camille to Wind Gap because he knows there are some demons she needs to face before she can be whole again.

Actually, it’s really one main demon named Adora, played with icy calculation by Patricia Clarkson. Adora is the kind of Southern Dame who makes everything about herself. She’s passive-aggressive only when she’s being polite. Most of the time, she’s aggressive-aggressive. Camille’s arrival in Wind Gap is an annoyance, in no small part because she considers Camille writing a story about the town’s tragedy to be in poor taste. Adora’s life is a series of routines and manners. Anything that interrupts her life of amaretto sours and social outings is not just a problem but an all-out tragedy. She strikes out verbally and emotionally at Camille any chance she gets, and the balance between Clarkson and Adams is stunning. Abusive mothers have a long legacy in film and TV, but rarely have they come across so believably. It’s easy to see why someone would come out of Adora’s house damaged, and why that person returning to Adora’s house would barely be able to keep it together.

Complicating matters is that there’s a young lady in Adora’s house right now in the form of Camille’s young half-sister Amma (Eliza Scanlen). Not only does Amma remind Camille of her younger self but she also brings up ghosts of Camille’s dead sister Marian. Death lingers in every room of this house. In fact, every place in Wind Gap feels a little haunted. Even the public parks have the echoes of past crimes and traumatic memories. And Amma is trying to be a teenager in this gothic landscape. At home, with Adora, she acts younger than her age, dressing up like a little girl and playing with dollhouses. Outside the house, she drinks and flirts with older boys. She’s a terror. And she’s really essential to the narrative of “Sharp Objects”. She is potential victim & abuser and child & adult in one confused body. She is both Camille, the girl who got away, and Marian, the girl who did not, at the same time.

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