The Twisted, Enthralling Rot of<em> Sharp Objects</em>
The eeriest part of watching Sharp Objects is when you begin noticing all the things that shouldn’t be there. Maybe it’s a little girl dressed in white, sitting on a sofa that was empty seconds ago, or a spider hanging over a gauzy canopy bed in a bright-purple room. But mostly it’s words, carved in big block letters, that keep surfacing. DIRTY, written in dust on the trunk of a car. BAD, scratched into the surface of a wooden desk. CURLS, on the stump of an old tree. HARMFUL, on the interior of a Jeep door, visible for only a second. VANISH, in raised white scar tissue on human skin.
Like 2017’s , is directed in its entirety by the Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée and adapted from a book—in this case, from the debut novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, the author of . But if was soapy melodrama elevated by superb performances and Vallée’s extraordinary visual eye, is Southern Gothic for the 21st century, probing the grim heritage and often squalid reality of small-town America. In the and Flynn, who wrote several episodes, the eight-part series is told with literary invention. It contains so many fascinating, grotesque details—children clutching pistols, floors inlaid with elephant tusks, a detective carrying a pig’s head in a paper bag—that you almost forget the central mystery: Someone in the fictional town of Wind Gap, Missouri, is killing teenage girls and extracting the teeth from their corpses using pliers.
