Later that night, the living girls of Wind Gap are all at a house party. Already drunk from the pity party, Camille lets Amma drag her along and dose her with OxyContin, then ecstasy. “We have a dead sister, just like John Keene,” Amma tells her friends. “And she’s never, ever dealt with it.” Speaking of John, Ashley is surprised to discover that he isn’t welcome at the party. This kind of rejection is her worst nightmare. It’s starting to seem likely that Ashley is obsessed with Camille, and with the glamorous life she imagines her leading “in a big mansion with a few curly tops and a big investment banker husband.” She is also consumed by a desire to see her name in print. As far as Ashley is concerned, being popular and locally famous is a ticket out of Wind Gap — which makes it pretty confusing that she won’t tell Camille what happened to her ear. For her part, Camille is struggling mightily to escape devolving into the wild, miserable, victimized cheerleader she was in high school. Too bad she finds Amma irresistible. They leave the party together high and on roller skates, two half sisters who finally feel as close to each other as Camille once did to Marian. That dead girl, as well as Alice, flashes through her mind as she and Amma whirl together. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” Amma tells Camille. “I’m bored all the time. That’s why I act the way I do.” You get the sense that Amma is doing what it takes to survive in Wind Gap without buying into the victim mentality that has stymied so many other local women. When she and her friends dance to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” singing along the whole time, it’s as if they’re preemptively objectifying themselves so that no one else can do it first. “When you let them do it to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma says to Camille later, referring to her hookups with boys. “You have the control.” Reporter’s Notebook: • Lots of hidden words this week! They do seem to crop up most frequently when Camille is intoxicated. I spotted “curly” (which foreshadows Ashley’s “curly tops” comment) on the log Camille falls over in the woods at the beginning of the episode. At Katie’s house, “petticoat,” “baby-doll,” and “cock” are all visible; a cognac ad hanging on the wall includes the word “fornicate.” As Camille is getting out of the car at the high-school party, either “awful” or “harmful” is scratched into the inside door — the confusion there may be intentional. And during Camille and Amma’s ride home, “bottle” is written in graffiti on the passing train, an old building is labeled “auto dosage shop,” a railroad crossing sign says “dumpling,” and “bodice” replaces “police” on the side of Vickery’s cop car. • Aside from what Willis learns at the rehab center and from Jackie, this week’s big news in the case is that Ann’s bike has turned up in the pond at the pig farm. Later, Vickery reveals to Willis that a Mexican worker has come forward and identified John as the person who dumped it. There are plenty of reasons to doubt this apparent breakthrough — not least that there are still two episodes left in the series. It is also a pretty convenient discovery for Adora and Vickery.<doc-sep>One reason you can be sure HBO’s Sharp Objects is a true Southern Gothic is that when its debutante gloves finally unpeel, you don’t just get an effusion of secrets and darkness and a lot of deep-buried social dysfunction. In episode six, “Cherry,” once the passive-aggressive politeness starts to give away to truth-telling, you also get some unhinged wildness: ear-biting, some light incest, some heavy sociopathy, and a literal shit pit. Yes, the intensity and the memories are ramping up for Camille as she revisits her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. But in “Cherry,” there are also some significant developments in the case, in case you were so distracted by all the sociopathy and incest you forgot there were murders to solve. Granted, we don’t learn much about the murders. But what we do learn is weighty. The tangled family ties between Amma and Camille get even knottier Like every episode before it, “Cherry” stints on procedural case-file crime-solving and delivers juicy drama, reams of gossip, and subtext thicker than summer heat in a tent revival. In this go-round, director Jean-Marc Vallée puts the focus back on Amma’s relationship with Camille, as our favorite teen fatale lures her older sister through a typical suburban house party, where Amma gets into a brief fight with John Keene (the brother of murder victim No. 2, Natalie) and his girlfriend Ashley over their mutual suspicions of each other. We get a brief sis-on-sis kiss, then a rare moment of sisterly bonding that doesn’t feel entirely manipulative on Amma’s part — at least until she asks Camille to take her back to St. Louis with her. It’s a revealing moment for both sisters. Amma, who admits openly that none of her friends like her, but she knows how to control them, calls Camille her “soulmate,” then laughs, saying that maybe this is what a bond of sisterhood feels like. Camille, drugged out and feeling pretty great about it, keeps having flashbacks to all the dead girls she’s loved before — her dead younger sister, Marianne, and her dead hospital roommate — but she lets herself give in to Amma anyway. Meanwhile, Camille’s threadbare relationship with her mother is almost worn through; after last week’s ice-cold declaration from Adora that she never loved her daughter, this week mom wants daughter out of the house. Camille is dragging her feet, though, in part because new facts about the crime are emerging, and in part because of her developing feelings for Detective Willis, who’s doing a little investigation into Camille’s ill-fated stint in the hospital where her roommate died by suicide. And probably there’s plenty of reluctant love there for Amma, too. And we also get some major murder clues! Camille notices that someone appears to have bitten off a huge chunk of Ashley’s ear, which is about as disturbing to look at in the episode as it is to write out. When Camille confronts her about this, asking if Natalie might have done it when she was being murdered, Ashley hisses that if Camille wants to know about Natalie, she should ask the girl’s mother. And speaking of another dead girl, we still don’t know how Camille’s sister Marianne died, though in this episode someone finally asks if anyone ever conducted an autopsy. “Of course not,” Adora’s best friend Jackie tells Detective Willis; Adora wouldn’t allow her to be “carved up.” (At this point I think we can probably go ahead and put “best friend” in irony quotes, yikes, Jacks.) Finally, the biggest clue: workers at Adora’s pig farm pull the bike of Ann Nash, the first victim — which she was riding when she disappeared — out of a sludge pond. Later, one of the workers claims he saw John Keene bury it there. Naturally, this doesn’t look good for John. For one thing, there’s Bob Nash’s cut-off assertion from an earlier episode that he saw John up to suspicious behavior while working at the pig farm; and there’s Adora’s quick-firing of him from the farm for unknown reasons. But we also know one other suspect who’s fond of hanging around the slaughterhouse: Amma. And given that Sharp Objects has leaned very hard into signaling that the murderer is a woman, it’s probably high time we look at the evidence for and against our favorite burgeoning Machiavellian. It’s probably not Amma! I’m going to split with my colleague Alex Abad-Santos here and say that I don’t think it’s Amma — though I agree it’s highly telling that no one has suspected her (except John Keene, who clearly thinks she’s a criminal). For one thing, since she’s the only current suspect we know who was super-friendly with the murder victims, she’s the too-obvious frontrunner. But more importantly, I don’t believe that the tools in Amma’s toolbox — weaponized femininity, emotional manipulation, and secret knowledge — are really joined with sociopathy. True, we’ve seen her manipulate and cajole Camille and her friends throughout the series, and we’ve seen her manipulate and lie to her mother while effectively creating a double life for herself. And she does apparently read Machiavelli, which, okay, Amma, you do you, girl. But her manipulation of her mother has, so far, been about creating that double life, and gaining some unhealthy recreational escapism, all because she’s bored. That’s pretty typical teenage fare. And while her ugliest moments — the lollipop in Camille’s hair, her forcing Camille to reveal her body in the previous episode, and her choice to create a giant drama by running into the woods on Calhoun Day — have all been very ugly, indeed, they’ve also revolved around her need for love and attention from Camille. She puts the used lollipop in Camille’s hair after seeing her with Detective Willis and reacting out of jealousy; she runs into the woods after realizing that Camille’s not paying any attention to her performance because she’s chatting with Willis instead of watching her. She steals Camille’s clothes in the dressing room out of anger that Camille didn’t share her article with her before she published it for the whole town.<doc-sep>Camille's worlds collide and unleash holy here — next week is going to be a firestorm. [Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Sharp Objects” Episode 7, “Falling.”] “My mother did it.” Four simple words have rarely been so powerful and meant so much. After a meeting with her Aunt Jackie (Elizabeth Perkins), Camille (Amy Adams) caught up with the viewers watching at home and realized what her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), had done: She poisoned and killed her long-dead sister, Marion; she’s poisoning and killing her rebellious half-sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen); and she may have poisoned and killed the other little girls in Wind Gap. That’s a lot to take in, and given how much Camille already went through this episode — a painful connection with another grieving sibling, sex with her clothes off (scars exposed), and some harsh words from her closest ally, Richard (Chris Messina) — she handles the news pretty well. Yet setting aside what state Camille will be left in at series’ end, those watching at home should’ve responded pretty well, too, and that’s credit to a season’s worth of savvy buildup. So much happens in the penultimate hour, and it happens fast, but the audience is with Camille every step of the way because of how beautifully structured “Sharp Objects” has been. And more than plot, there are thematic implications as well; enough to spend the next seven days and beyond unpacking each one. Anne Marie Fox/HBO The killer, the motive, Camille’s personal connection to both: All that information doesn’t come crashing down at once. “Sharp Objects” takes as much time as it can spacing out the key evidence and the confirmation. Gillian Flynn, Marti Noxon, and Jean-Marc Vallee share the motive and suspect first, when Richard meets with Marion’s former nurse, then they allow Aunt Jackie to speak on behalf of the family — and break the harsh truth to Camille. A revelation of this magnitude — tying together the series’ murder-mystery and Camille’s personal odyssey, which were thought to be largely separate up until now — could’ve gone off the rails; it could’ve been such a whopper, viewers would roll their eyes instead of gasping in horror. Instead, the culmination proves emotionally resonant and makes for one juicy twist. Moreover, because the series is more focused on following Camille through to the end than unveiling its killer, the fact that the show pretty much solves the mystery with an episode left to air isn’t a deterrent; everyone should be invested in Camille (not to mention poor, suffering Amma) enough to eagerly anticipate her ultimate showdown with Adora. (That there are still other questions to be answered helps, too, such as what Alan’s role was in all this.) As tempting as it is to start the hype for next week, let’s take a second to admire the specific artistry that got us to such an exciting precipice. The pre-titles opening is so spooky, but also quite telling: Camille looks into the dollhouse and sees something moving; there’s something out of place, something scary, inside her house. That it’s all part of her dream only illustrates how her subconscious is trying to tell her something — similar to the end of last week’s episode when a little girl (presumably Marion) whispers to Camille as she’s falling asleep, “It’s not safe for you here.” As soon as Camille wakes up, Adora is sitting there, like a hawk watching over her roost, making sure her baby doesn’t leave the nest. That her attempt to coddle Camille into submission proves unsuccessful causes two reactions: First, she twists Camille’s anger, be it out of conscious, vengeful anger or a subconscious pinch of a swollen spot. Next, she overdoes it with Amma, pulling out every trick in the book to get her youngest child to do as she pleases. But before Adora maliciously mutters “you don’t need me to make you grilled cheese,” the audience is clued into why she’s behaving that way. Anne Marie Fox/HBO “Munchausen’s by proxy syndrome,” the nurse tells Richard. She explains that it’s a mental illness in adults, typically mothers, where they make someone else sick so they can nurse them back to health. But the real prize is the sympathy and adoration of others; they want to be seen trying to help people because there’s “nothing more laudable than a woman who puts all her energy into her sick child.” “You’re saying Adora has this?” Richard says. “I’m saying people have this,” the nurse says pointedly, and after a few more words Vallee cuts to the aforementioned scene so we can see Adora in action. It’s what he’s done well all season: flashing to bits of information that serve as tone-setters yet add up to so much more. Here, a simple edit serves as the next step in revealing the mystery. From that point forward (approximately 10 minutes into the episode), it’s clear what the Crellin family matriarch has been up to, but it’s not until a half-hour later that Camille is clued in. “You don’t like my bloodies,” her aunt says, “that’s cause they’re shirtty, I know. But every time I ask you to drink it, you do.” “Why is that?” Camille asks, knowing the answer already. “It’s easier,” Jackie says. “You made it hard — harder on yourself, harder on Adora. Marion made it easier.” Sometimes it’s good not to make things easy, especially if you’re a woman in America, a woman in Wind Gap, or Camille inside her mother’s house. “Sharp Objects” drove that point home in Episode 7, plus many more, and its resonance will last far beyond next week’s finale. Grade: A “Sharp Objects” airs its series finale on Sunday, August 26 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.<doc-sep>Sharp Objects Cherry Season 1 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating 5 stars * * * * * « Previous Next Photo: HBO “I never loved you,” the whispered cruelty Adora says in the closing moments of the previous episode haunt “Cherry”. Let’s discuss the gravity of this statement for a moment. A part of Camille has perhaps always known this about her mother. Adora’s emotional remove and icy demeanor is hard to miss. But hearing it is another story. These words bring out a hunger in Camille, a hunger so consuming she rushes headlong into trouble just to feel. By the time she’s swinging hand in hand with Amma in their grand front lawn soaked in liquor and bristling with the energy of the ecstasy she took it’s evident Camille is trying to capture a speck of joy. The kind of joy she lost in her childhood — unencumbered by self-doubt and anxiety and the nagging memories that come with living in this world for any lengthy amount of time. On some level she’s trying to prove to herself she’s not the kind of woman Adora believes her to be — diamond hard and marred by untold traumas. “Cherry” is a powerhouse of an episode. It distills what Sharp Objects excels at: sharpened moods, spiky emotional interactions, and editing guided by the emotional logic of personal memory. It crackles and sings with such an astute understanding of mood it left me feeling as bruised as Camille does at the end. It’s a feast of visual bravura, editing ingenuity, and cunning emotional reveals. What makes “Cherry” the best episode of Sharp Objects thus far is how it cuts into the bruised underbelly of its central idea: the barbed relationships between women and how that in turn shapes their own conception of their womanhood. She looked like a shipwrecked bride. That’s what I thought watching Camille in the episode’s opening moments, stumbling in her Calhoun Day finest amongst the lush woods with ghosts from her past puncturing the landscape as she searches for Amma. This line is from the Angela Carter short story “Lady of the House of Love.” I thought a lot about Carter throughout the episode. The way it swims through time using Camille’s perspective and the way it feels at once decadent yet tipping into rot to interrogate womanhood through the genre lens of Southern gothic brought to mind the British writer’s gorgeous prose. There are so many hidden grooves to this episode you have to rewatch it to catch the full weight of gestures or the words Camille imagines in the landscape — “bodice” instead of “police” on the side of Vickery’s SUV and “curly” carved into the wood during her dream. When Camille wakes from this dream she’s in bed with Richard. They’re a study in contrasts. He’s completely naked, she’s fully dressed. (Although his penis is shadowed for those wondering.) She’s consistently in shadow, he’s in the light. They trade flirtatious barbs. But there is a roiling unease to their dynamic. “You slept in your clothes? If you want I’m the proud owner of a 14-year-old flannel,” he tries to casually say. “Sounds like you’re halfway to a question you want to ask me,” she retorts. Once Richard starts digging into Camille’s past — visiting the mental health center she checked herself into, piecing together her trajectory — it became clear just how doomed their romance is. The dynamic between Camille and Richard is fascinating but it’s the knotted landscape of women’s relationships with each other that is especially ripe. Camille’s old cheerleader “friends” have been bubbling at the edge of the story thus far making bitchy remarks cloaked in honeyed tones. When the pregnant Angie picks up Camille offering whiskey and gossip I knew this was not going to end well. Angie nicely makes prodding remarks to find out if Camille is married or dating. There is a pivotal flashback from Camille’s high school years that frames the reunion. In it, Camille is practicing and dressed in her cheerleading uniform. The girls trade nasty remarks when Camille stops complaining of cramps. Becca, the only black girl in the group, takes a supportive posture offering her a water bottle and massaging her leg. Becca only stops when she sees blood dripping down Camille’s leg. Jokes ensue but it’s not her period but the beginning of her self-harm. The truth is in the blood when you know where to look. There’s so much to these scenes between Camille and her former cheerleader peers — how quickly their dynamic is established with the wine, crying over Beaches, and statements like “Don’t let feminism tell you what to do with your family!” when one of them mentions returning to work for a sense of purpose. But what I’m most struck by is watching Camille and Becca, both somewhat outsiders to this group for very different reasons. It feels genuine the same way it does when Camille hugs Gayla in the kitchen earlier. The conversation between Becca and Camille is interrupted when the other women drift outside as if smelling genuine happiness in the air draws their interest in sowing seeds of discord. The conversation drifts to the murders which Katie, Kirk’s chipper and very blonde wife, takes the opportunity to extol the joys of motherhood and implicitly insult Camille’s own womanhood. “Camille doesn’t have any children and you don’t feel the pain the way we do,” one says. “I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I don’t think part of your heart can ever work if you don’t have kids.” Katie’s face brightens, “I didn’t really become a woman until I felt Mackenzie inside of me.” This pointed critique of Camille feels all the more important when you look at it alongside Alan’s attempt to kick Camille, at Adora’s request, out in the most diplomatic yet insulting way possible. He argues that she would have sympathy from Adora if she knew what she had been through. And what has she been through?<doc-sep>
‘It’s not safe here for you’ I know there are mixed feelings about the pace of Sharp Objects, but I’m enjoying its slow creep immensely. This episode had the hallmarks of an unfolding horror show and at times it was genuinely chilling. There is a growing sense of doom, with characters chucking ominous warnings around, as when Frank Curry’s wife, Eileen, told Camille that: “It’s closing in on you, huh?” When Camille and Amma spun around together on the lawn – Amma’s face melting into those of the dead girls – it was frightening and unnerving. Ditto for the warning at the end: was that a vision of Marian, telling Camille (and even Amma?) that she wasn’t safe here? Adora, too, was a skulking figure, listening at the door. Alan’s story of her mother’s cruelty gave some context about her coldness towards Camille and raised my suspicions of her again, not least because of that mysterious phone call alerting her to Ann’s bike and the “Don’t do a thing till I get there”. There is little pretence of familial love for Camille any more after last week’s confrontation – Adora wants her out, just as much as she wants Alan to be the one to kick her out. But – and I may be reaching here – perhaps there was more to the conversation between them than a simple request to leave. “I believe she’s outstayed her welcome,” said Adora. “We’ve been more than tolerant,” Alan replied. If either, or both, is a suspect, that takes on a new menace. Quiet menace ... Adora (Patricia Clarkson). Photograph: HBO In many ways, Amma is the archetype of a bored, small-town teenage girl. She looks for trouble, she is reckless to the point of being self-destructive and she is testing the limits of her power. You can see why, for Camille – whose teenage years were far from content; we find out just how early the cutting began in a cheerleading flashback – spending time with Amma makes for a potentially combustible combination. There was a lot of discomfort here, but I found the image of Camille at the party and in the car, drunk and taking drugs with young teenagers (isn’t Amma 14? ), one of the most uncomfortable of all. The sense of foreboding was strong. Ashley is pushing her way to the front of the story, too. She knows about Camille and admires her Wind Gap legacy. She wants to be in the paper, but she is making up what we know are lies about the dead girls, saying they were angels, well-behaved, when we know that not to be the case. Her point about the killer doing it to be popular, about John not being the killer – because that would make him cool – was very odd. Much like John, who ups the ominous quota by telling Amma: “It’ll be your day soon.” When Amma says to Camille, in the closing moments: “Do you ever feel like bad things are gonna happen to you and you can’t stop it?” I don’t doubt her instinct. Not cool enough to kill? John Keene (Taylor John Smith). Photograph: HBO Who is the killer? Apart from the cut on the hand, there is little more to suggest that my Alan theory is correct. There are two key questions here: who called Adora to tell her about the discovery of Ann’s bike; and is the factory worker fingering John as the one who dumped it telling the truth? It doesn’t seem likely. There are other trails of breadcrumbs in the bite mark on Ashley’s ear, Adora’s schemings, even Jackie’s weary resignation, as if she is just waiting for Richard to figure it all out. Notes and observations Ol’ blue eyes ... listen to a clip of Call Me Irresponsible by Frank Sinatra. Spotify Alan was listening to Frank Sinatra’s Call Me Irresponsible; the kids at the house party were playing Sage the Gemini’s Don’t You; and, of course, they danced to Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, which, according to Shazam, was the Engelbert Humperdinck version. The closing credits song was Ghost by the Acid. As well as being scarier than previous episodes, I also thought it was funnier, at times. Adora’s dig about Camille’s parking (“Even the lawn’s not safe from her”) made me laugh, as did the ex-cheerleaders drinking, weeping about their marriages and watching Beaches.