Sharp Objects Recap: Mommy Dearest

Sharp Objects/ Episode 2: “Dirt”/ HBO We join our unlikely hero… um, our unlikely… uh… we join Camille Preeker in bed. Her memory is flashing between past and present, a disorienting experience that seems to plague her often. It’s after the discovery of the Ann Nash’s body in the alley so the image of that toothless girl is being shuffled in with flashes of her dead sister and another girl, taller and a bit older. Everyone is preparing for the funeral. Her (hateful ass) mother is proper in all black and a Jackie O hat. Amna, who is menacing in her own saccharine sweet way, is playing with her doll house and watching; she’s always watching.

Meanwhile, Kansas City, the big city cop still stuck in Wind Gap, is getting the straight razor smooth shave and chatting the barber up about who’s leaving flowers where the most recent dead girl’s body was found and the town’s peculiar and superstitious ways of warding off future violence. The tension between Adora and Camille is so good and thick and horrible that I want to start a GoFundMe to pay for their family therapy. Patricia Clarkson and Amy Adams outdo themselves in every scene they have together. Even as Adora nitpicks Camille’s funeral attire because she is after all a reflection of her mother, Adora chides her daughter about treating their funeral as work. But isn’t that exactly what it is for Adora, town matriarch? The not quite parallel and not nearly as full of outright animosity between Vickery and Kansas City is in full d…