TV Rewind: In HBO’s Sharp Objects, Hereditary Horror Takes Center Stage

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Released in 2006, Gillian Flynn’s debut novel Sharp Objects focuses on Camille Preaker, a journalist who travels back to her hometown to investigate a potential serial killer on the loose. What follows is a tense thriller about womanhood and a town still reeling from past horrors, often examining how these two threads intersect. The relationship between Camille, her mother Adora, and her half sister Amma is central to how Flynn delves into her themes, examining how abuse can unfortunately become a hereditary horror. 

The novel was adapted into a miniseries for HBO in 2018, which resulted in a critically acclaimed hit. Flynn’s story translated well to the small screen, with its 8-episode runtime allowing the story to truly flourish. In the hands of the late Quebecois director Jean-Marc Vallée, Sharp Objects was able to become more than a murder mystery, a treatment that another Flynn adaptation, Dark Places (2015), wasn’t lucky enough to receive. Here, the central themes of the book unfold into the most prominent aspects of the show, not abandoning the thrills but rather allowing them to take a backseat while Vallée explores the ever-present thread that connects Camille (Amy Adams) to her mother and half sister Amma (Eliza Scanlen).

Vallée understood that Sharp Objects is more than a murder mystery. The weaving of threads showcasing toxic mother-daughter dynamics and abusive familial relationships within the story’s narrative melds seamlessly with the murder of two young girls that Camille is researching. While these themes are essential to Flynn’s written work, Vallée increases them tenfold. The director masterfully utilizes the talent of his central actresses to solidify that, at the end of the day, Sharp Objects is truly a story about the threads of abuse that can trickle down through families. 

As Camille first arrives in her hometown of Wind Gap, it’s immediately clear that she feels as if an omnipresent weight has just been placed upon her shoulders. We’re given glimpses of her childhood in flashbacks throughout the series, fragmented memories of a past filled with abuse of all kinds; from her mother cloaked in white to the neighborhood boys that walk the streets like ravenous apparitions. As she drives through town towards the home she grew up in, it’s clear that no matter how far away Camille found herself in adulthood, she is still haunted by these memories. She peers out of the car window with trepidation, gazing at the streets almost as if she’s prepared for people from her past to materialize out of thin air. Once she arrives at her childhood home, it becomes apparent that some of these memories cannot stay buried, especially in the company of the monster that haunts her the most.

When we are first introduced to Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson), Camille’s mother, she appears like the typical Southern belle; she calls home a sprawling mansion, her slim body is donned in a pink nightgown, and her strawberry blond hair is laid perfectly upon her head. The gentility that is aroused when first looking at her is nothing like the predatory gaze she lays upon Camille at their reunion. She strokes her daughter’s hair, as if she’s inspecting her like a flea ridden dog who passed you on the street, telling her that she didn’t prepare for visitors, before begrudgingly allowing Camille to enter.

In transforming Flynn’s words into images on a screen, Vallée is able to give the viewer a more concrete look at Camille and Adora’s relationship. Sly words are still present, yes, but they’re paired with subtle looks and actions as well. Here, we can see what Adora thinks of Camille, her eyes staring at her eldest daughter’s face almost as if she is a mystery Adora is still attempting to uncover. Patricia Clarkson is magnetic, her gaze simmering every time she looks at Camille, attempting to unveil and break her down into her smallest parts. Still, after all these years Camille has spent away, Adora views her daughter as a challenge. One that despite her best efforts, she just wasn’t able to crack.

The violence at the center of Camille’s being is self-centered, whereas Adora’s is reflected outwards. Like her own mother, Adora suffers from Munchausen by proxy, and has inflicted the same abuse on her children that her own mother inflicted upon her. In fact, Adora’s illness became so severe that she even poisoned her second born child Marian (Lulu Wilson) when Camille was a child. Marian’s ghostly figure haunts not only Sharp Objects’ narrative, but two generations of the Preaker/Crellin family. Flashes of Marian’s face gleam off the screen akin to how she appears to Camille in her head. In remembering Marian, Camille is forced to reconcile with the image of her mother as a murderer. 

Camille was born defying Adora and the expectations set for women in Wind Gap. Amma calls her “incorrigible” (a repetition of their mother’s own words), spunky in nature, whereas women in the town are expected to be subservient. Born out of wedlock with a man who didn’t stick around, from her conception to her birth Camille was viewed as a mistake by her mother. While Amma is rambunctious as well, she becomes docile in Adora’s care, using her mother’s sickness as a means to get what she wants. Once Adora is sent to jail, Camille is disturbed by the thought that she herself is good at caring for Amma not out of kindness, but because she has “Adora’s sickness.” 

Her efforts to be good and better than her own mother have in turn become part of the reason Camille inflicts harm upon herself, carving words into her skin as an ever present reminder of her failures. In Flynn’s novel, Camille tells herself that “a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort,” which is exactly what Camille does. She harms herself in an attempt to feel at home within her own body, remembering Adora and the brief semblance of love she felt as a child only through the pain she inflicts upon herself. The same can be said for the end of the show, where Camille allows herself to be poisoned, almost as if she wants to feel what Marian felt throughout her very short life.  

During a conversation on their porch in Episode 5, Adora begins to tell Camille about her father. What could have been a moment of connection between the two lost souls instead becomes another form of punishment. “You can’t get close,” Adora begins. “That’s your father. And it’s why I think I never loved you. You were born to it… that cold nature. I hope that’s some comfort to you.” She says this while gazing into Camille’s eyes, vengeful in her words but delivering them like she truly believes hearing this will help Camille heal from whatever affliction Adora believes her to have. With these words, Camille finally learns that no matter what she does, Adora will not love her. She can lay in bed like her sisters and sip back doses of poison, but it still won’t make Adora love her like she’s loved her two other, more malleable children. 

Sharp Objects remains a powerful reminder of the ways childhood trauma can linger throughout adulthood. Camille cuts herself as punishment, no doubt hearing Adora’s voice in her head as she does so, and drinks to numb the memories that are dug up once she enters Wind Gap. Her relationship with Adora is used as the anchor to amplify ideas surrounding familial abuse and munchausen by proxy, and this thread appears to be wrapped up once Adora is ultimately charged for the murder of the two girls that drew Camille back home. In that moment, as Adora is arrested in her own luxurious home, it feels as if justice not only for the murder victims but Camille and her sisters has been served. Finally, this monstrous figure is punished for the ills she enacted on the girls she has had an influence over. 

But, in the final five minutes of the series finale, when Camille is looking at Amma’s dollhouse and plucks a human tooth from the tiles in the miniature bathroom, it becomes clear that Adora is not the culprit Camille and the audience have made her out to be. Instead, it is Amma, who we watch murder her victims in a haphazardly-shot final sequence edited into the show’s credits. However, before we see proof, we watch as Camille turns with a shattered look of betrayal to Amma watching her in the doorway. Here, it comes crashing down just how far these threads of violence have stretched in Sharp Objects, further entangling Camille and Amma into a life smothered by reminders of their mother and the abuse they suffered, and in turn, caused because of her influence on them. 

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Kaiya Shunyata is a freelance pop culture writer and academic based in Toronto. They have written for Rogerebert.com, Xtra, The Daily Dot, and more. You can follow them on Twitter, where they gab about film, queer subtext, and television.

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