Sharp Objects Review

Camille Preaker drinks steadily, hides words carved into her skin under long sleeves, and is sent by her editor to report on two murdered girls in the town she fled. Jean-Marc Vallée directed every episode and edits memory straight into the present, half-second flashes of the past cut into a drive or a conversation, so that the town and the trauma become inseparable. All the music is heard by the characters, including four Led Zeppelin songs.

Amy Adams gives perhaps her best performance, sardonic, self-loathing and much smarter than the town, and Patricia Clarkson, who won a Golden Globe, plays her mother Adora as a honeyed, suffocating matriarch of Southern gentility. Eliza Scanlen, as Camille's volatile teenage half-sister Amma, is a discovery. Noxon has described fights with Vallée over how much of the script's language he would keep, and the finished series favours image over word.

The slow burn is real and the mystery is thin. Some critics found it dreary before the last episode, and the resolution arrives in a rush, partly in a scene after the credits begin. What stays is the atmosphere, the acting and Vallée's sense of how a place goes on hurting someone who left it long ago.