Sharp Objects Premiere Recap: Crumbling Façades at Casa de Creep

Sharp Objects Season 1 Episode 1 Recap — “Vanish”

Where can you get Rectify, the first season of True Detective, any show set in the U.S. South with the word Blood in the title plus a Southern Comfort-wielding, Led Zeppelin blasting badass female lead who drives a vintage Volvo? Yes, yes, yes, Sharp Objects is finally here!

Created by Buffy alumna Marti Nixon, this show leans heavily on the Southern Goth, and I can’t help but shake the feeling that it’s also very much the product of a bunch of execs sitting in a room together and looking at all that very precise viewing data everyone’s been talking about recently in order to piece together a crafty little firework of things people seem to be looking for in tv series nowadays that will keep audiences streaming past the 11 minute mark. It’s also a good example for the way in which good direction and acoustics can smooth over a script that quite frequently wants to walk the line between cliché and pastiche, which, in its favor, works out more often than not.

We’re introduced to this Gyllian Flynn novel come to life by Beverly Marsh young muckraker Camille Preaker (played by Sophia Lillis, who I first very foolishly placed in Stranger Things before realizing she’d actually played that other tomboy in an 80’s callback — the 2017 remake of It) and her little sister sneaking around the grounds of their huge and beautiful (so beautiful it must be crumbling on the inside) historic Southern mansion at a time when young girls carried candy bars in their back pockets instead of iphones.

In one of the first of a string of flashbacks that move in and out of the present-day storyline in an almost — Lynchian moebius structure — (coincidence or viewing analytics?) — the girls don’t do much except ride around on roller skates while evoking a very urgent sense of dread. Well, they do one more thing, which is sneak into Amy Adams’ bedroom and attempt to etch something into her hand with a paper clip.

But we don’t really find out what it is because at this point the show fades over into prototypical drunk and broken anti-heroine adult Camille (Amy Adams)’s day at work, which is nothing if not magical: She’s on the payroll in a real brick-and-mortar newsroom with not one exercise ball or hip person under 25 in sight, a workplace that is so old-school, the subtitled version I was watching mentions “a pencil-sharpener whirring.” What’s more, her boss, Curry, is an amazing and no-bullshit father figure straight out of The Wire season 5, who says things like, “How are things at home?”, and “Call me if you need me”. In the words of Jonathan Van Ness, I love him, and I am obsessed with him.

Except he’s sending Amy Adams to her horrible home town, Wind Gap, unwavering pop. of 2000, just a spittin’ distance from Tennessee, where, we find out, the only real industry is “hog butchering” (!), and you’ve really only got “your trash and your old money,” with Camille being “trash, from old money,” who now has to go back an investigate the possible murder of a young girl gone missing in a place I have the feeling she might just have spent her whole adult life trying to forget — just a hunch. The young girl’s name is Nathalie Keene, and her disappearance comes on the heels of a similar case one year prior, the murder of a girl called Ann Nash.

We already caught a glimpse of Wind Gap from the opening shots of the series, and basically, this is what’s in store for Camille: A barbershop, a candy shop, a whole bunch of George Bush posters and even more very frantic cicadas. Oh, and a very beautiful mansion with a deep history we’re super excited to find out more about, even if our heroine doesn’t yet look entirely convinced she’s up to it.

So off she drives in that vintage Volvo, blasting “I Can’t Quit you Baby” by Led Zeppelin on the radio and laying out an assortment of tiny liquor bottles and candy bars on her hotel bed (Why not just buy one big one?), so in case you missed it, this flawed main character seems to have a very serious drinking problem! Who is it you can’t seem to quit, Camille?

Other things we find out about Camille during her road trip down to Wind Gap: She really likes to bathe, especially in very muddy waters (!), where there must be a billion leeches — has she not watched Stand by Me?? while floating between the present and the past and masturbating to a memory of a shed filled with…dried vaginas? Well that definitely beats Dominique DiPierro’s nighttime solo activity.

We’re glad she finally makes it to her destination, where her first stop is the police department from Two Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Except it’s not, it’s Wind Gap, where everybody knows your name, and the police chief Camille is trying to interview realizes, “You’re the — [girl who’s sister was brutally killed twenty years ago] — you moved away.”

The cop doesn’t really want to talk, so Camille hits up a local bar, where she very sternly tells her boss on the phone that there is absolutely zero small town charm far and wide in this place. Cut to: a hipster’s wet dream of a divey Southern “local watering hole.” Oh Camille, why can’t you see the beauty?

We quickly run into another person on whom the aesthetic irony seems completely lost, namely Big Shot Big City detective Willis (Chris Messina), who really doesn’t want to be here and is aching for some “big city” conversation (He’s from Kansas City!). Camille and Willis run into each other at the search site in the woods, where she also talks to a bunch of girls on roller skates — déja vu much?, who are smoking weed and laughing at inappropriate things like murder. Hm, not a huge fan of this show’s portrayal of Teenagers with a capital T, but I’ll let it slide for now because I’m not sure how realistic they’re supposed to be, seeing as they’re sitting in the woods with roller skates on.

Luckily, there’s a friendly face in the crowd, drunk Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) who’s come down all the way from Agrestic! We’re beginning to see that daytime drinking seems to be a bit of an issue in these parts, because, as Celia puts it, “No one should face all this without a little kick.” The way she watches Camille walk past, muttering “beauty, beauty, beauty” is what really reeled me in at this point.

If you thought that was depressing, wait until Camille goes to visit her mom. She sits on the porch for a bit before going in, where we find out in another flashback who it is Camille just can’t quit, baby (Can you guess who it is?), and we go in and meet Adora (Patricia Clarkson, this show has just got Six Feet Under greatness written all over it), who is wearing a breathtakingly beautiful and creepy long gown and is not amused that her daughter is just popping in without calling ahead and nosing around about the terrible goings-on around town, because what will the neighbors think and there wasn’t any time to make the house up for guests!

Camille’s stepfather Alan (Henry Czerny) is equally enthused to meet her:

- “Alan, Camille’s here!”

- Pause.

- “Who?”

Oh, the reddish hue in that house and that dark, dark piano music Alan puts on for us (Dietro Casa by Ludovico Einaudi). And then there’s that silent housekeeper — Get Out, I’m yelling at the laptop, partially because the housekeeper actually reminds me of the housekeepers in Get Out. She’s also the first person of color with a speaking part in the show (though it’s limited to “Who wants some eggs?”).

Luckily, Camille does get the hell out of there to head back to the divey hipster bar, and the Steve Miller Band in the car agrees that “Motherless children have a hard time.” At the bar, you’ve got your obligatory bad dude from the past (the bartender), and it’s set up in a pretty nonchalant, yeah-yeah-let’s-get-this-out-of-the-way kind of vibe that of course Messina is there and Camille and the detective will hook up eventually but then she’ll probably mess everything up by sleeping with the bad-news bartender guy. Oh, and we see our first “suspect” (who we all know isn’t the actual suspect), Nathalie Keene’s brother John (Taylor John Smith), rumored to be gay, sitting at the bar by himself. Yet jut just as Camille gets ready to pounce on a minor, Messina gets in the way with his stupid banter and Camille shoots back with something I wish for the life of me I could pull off at every single party I go to, which is, “I don’t do that — chat,” before proceeding to get the led out in her car all night long.

We then get another load of Blanche DuBois Adora who is really mean to her daughter and does a lot of what the subtitles call “humorless chuckling” while continuing to look breathtaking in those long gowns, before Camille heads to talk to the Ann Nash’s father, Bob Nash (Will Chase) who says things like “I’m sorry, Kool Aid’s all I got left” when offering a drink to Camille, and “I’d rather he kill her than rape her,” when questioned about his daughter’s murder.

As if that’s not enough for a pretty action and people-packed pilot episode, Camille then happens upon the body of Nathalie Keene in town, with the roller skating crew from the search party area watching, too. They really seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot.

Camille and Messina reconvene at the police station where Messina suggests “tabling the games” for now and Camille drinks a lot of whiskey to stop shaking from present (and past?) trauma(s). They argue about who should drive her home — have you ever heard of Uber? I’m not sure yet if some of these things are deliberately portrayed a little off-kilter. If so, I’m game.

There’s another phone call with Curry in here somewhere, and it’s important because we see here that his partner is an African-American woman, the second person of color with a speaking part in the episode, who embodies a strong visual contrast to the housekeeper in Casa de Creep, in what I assume is an attempt to add to the idea that Wind Gap floats around in a space and time several eras removed from big city big St. Louis.

OK, so we’ve got our setup, we’ve got our traditional who-donit and a deep morass of family issues do wade through this season. So, uh… where’s our first twist?

Well, unlike Camille’s half-sister Amma, who we’ve only heard about but not actually met in person at this point, the first twist of the episode appears exactly when it’s supposed to. Scratch that, we have met Amma before — twice. But let’s rewind:

Camille heads back to the house (Oh, why, Camille? Just go stay at the creepy hotel by the roadside! Put on some Led in the car again! Anything is better than that creepy reddish mansion with the terrifying piano music!)

Enter Amma — a real live doll with a bow in her hair and a very pretty dress who shows Camille her dollhouse and complains to Adora about changing the color scheme (“from gold to gray [!]). Oh yeah — and Amma turns out to be the roller skating girl who was blazing it up at the search site earlier.

“Did you know it was me?” Camille asks, as they head up the stairs, carefully avoiding their mutual sister’s room (which, of course, has remained untouched since her death and is full of creepy dolls and has a child’s dress laid out on the made bed). Oh, Camille. Of course she knew! This girl is so next-level batshit crazy it makes Adora look like Sandy Olsson from Grease.

What a day! Time for a bath! As Camille slides into the tub to a harrowing “Tumbling Lights” by The Acid (Damn, the shazamability of this show is off the charts!), we see scars carved into all parts of her body, including an etching of the eponymous “vanish.”

Crumbling Façades and a permanent sense of existential dread is what brought 40’s noir to flourish sixty years ago. Similar forces seem to be converging in 2018. I’m sticking around for Adora’s dresses, a good old whodunit, and that creepy mansion!