*SPOILER ALERT*
I don’t know what I watched and I don’t know whether I liked it.
Let me start by saying I thought Amy Adams was the lead in ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’. I was wrong. Very wrong. That was Isla Fisher. I was just super impressed at Amy Adams’ supposed acting range.
I binge watched Sharp Objects over the course of 2 days. From the dramatic opening to the chilling ending, Amy Adams draws you into a strange, not-real-but-real-enough worlds that is both disturbing and mesmerising. The story goes like this: Camille is a reporter who isn’t doing so well at work. She returns to Wind Gap (a fictional American mid-west town) upon the request of her mentor and boss to uncover the secrets of her hometown when a girl is murdered there, and everything goes horribly wrong.
I spent hours after finishing the series reading articles, trying to make sense of what I’d just watched (this one is my favourite: https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/sharp-objects-finale-ending-explained.html)
Primarily, though, the series made me think about female violence, and whether or not we provide enough space for it in society.
Camille returns to Wind Gap and every interaction with her mother Adora is painful. Her sister Amma is weird too, swinging between doting on Camille and dismissing her. Then there’s the issue of Camille’s dead sister Marian, who died of a mysterious illness when Camille was a teenager herself.
When it is finally revealed that Amma was the killer of the girl in Wind Gap, I found myself asking ‘How did I not realise this?’. I’m sure lots of people would say it was obvious from the start, but I didn’t even consider it. I was too busy examining the male characters, wondering why the hell this series wasn’t developing them more or giving them a backstory or a motive for killing a teenage girl.
Turns out the character that was the killer all along was the rollerblading teenager; the innocent yet sexualised Amma whose sociopathic tendencies I, and the rest of Wind Gap overlooked. The evidence was laid out in plain sight: Amma is manipulative, destructive, calculating, sly and vicious. She knows how to manipulate Camille even though Camille is 15 years older than her.
She kills piglets for fun.
Then there’s Adora, Camille and Amma’s mother. Oh, Adora. Her evil is laid bare for all to see; poison drips from her every word. She is obviously callous, the kind of character that makes me think of Gossip Girl’s Lily van der Woodsen gone wrong, a socialite mixed with something far more sinister. I got undertones of Coraline, when the mother’s web tries to suck her daughter in and trap her. Everyone is trapped in Adora’s web, even her husband, and her two daughters pay the heavy price of her Munchausen by Proxy. Her name is both ironic and truthful: she adores Amma, who is an anagram of Mama, but smothers her until she becomes a sociopath with an appetite for violence.
I twigged quite early that Adora could be the culprit of the murder, and by the end I thought if it isn’t a man, it must be her.
Still, even when Amma’s crimes are brought to light in their full gruesome brutality, (the teeth of a dead girl paving a dollhouse floor is a stroke of genius, but not quite as haunting as a small doll figurine perching on the dollhouse windowsill, in the exact position Camille finds the dead girl in in episode 1) I couldn’t quite believe that she was capable of murder.
Society teaches us that women aren’t scary. Men are the rapists, killers and violators. What I found interesting in this series was that the crime disipated into the background of the action, and what is left is a vivid portrayal of a fractured and disturbed family that shows just how suffocating and damaging family life can be.
Camille wears her scars visibly across her body; her arms are all jagged edges, her thighs are slashed and her stomach bares the marks of her inner torture brought on by her family traumas. She is almost disfigured by her scars. They bare a central metaphor of the series: the women are severely damaged inside, but their outer appearances – Camille in full clothing looks completely normal and has a beautiful face; Amma looks innocent and childlike – make everyone overlook the damage they are capable of, reducing them to simplified, two-dimensional versions of themselves.
Camille is called a slut by the detective she sleeps with after he finds her in bed with another man, whilst Amma is never looked into as a suspect for the murder of a girl she reveals bit by bit she spent a lot of time with.
As the credits role, you catch a second-long glimpse of a girl in a white dress looking out from the woods. The murderer. She was there all along, but we dismissed her.
The female perspective 