1x01 Vanish

[8.2/10] Sense memory is powerful. We strain to remember dates or names or episodes of our lives in the abstract. But put us in a familiar room, years or decades later, and the images of the place, the ghosts who used to haunt it, wash over us, whether we’re reaching for them or trying to push them away.

“Vanish” is awash in sense memory. Newspaper reporter Camile Preaker returns to Windgap, Missouri, her rural hometown that feels frozen-in-time, and the tragedies and traumas she suffered there interject themselves back into her mind after so much effort to shut them out.

The first episode of Sharp Objects deploys its fair share of tropes. There is the hard-drinking investigator steeling themself against anguish with the blurry warm security blanket of clear liquids. There is the closed-ranks local police station which can nonetheless boast one hunky detective who seems to harbor a liking for our protagonist. There’s the decorum-focused, image-conscious mother who has tension with her once-rebellious daughter. And there’s the small town with a dark secret, the gruesome things not talked about beneath the image so many residents are trying to protect, that may or may not have been with Windgap for decades, despite the recent spate of murders that brought our hero home.

But the miniseries not only grounds these familiar beats and plots in impeccable performance and haunting images. It anchors them in a magnetic sense of place. Windgap, Missouri feels real. The stately but faded southern home that gives off the vibe of old money, the worn out town square, the local watering hole that boasts feeble karaoke, all evoke a certain truth.

But more than that, there is an oppressive hum to the place, a sense that there’s something harsh or unspeakable behind the walls everywhere Camille goes. For her, this town is suffused not only with bad memories, but with everything about a community and a life she was trying to escape. Director Jean-Marc Vallée and company capture the feeling of disturbia and second-hand melancholy that permeates the show’s backdrop, conveying, without words, the feeling that at any minute something could reach out through the sun-dappled leaves and drag you back under.

Camille tries desperately, despite that sense, to stay afloat. “Vanish” tells one story with her in the present, and firmly implies another one in the past. In the here and now, she has been sent to Windgap to write a story about one murder and the possibility of another. By episode’s end, two young girls have turned up dead, throwing the town into a state of pain and unrest by genteel standards, and Camille has the chance to use her investigative know-how to not only smoke out some suspects, but maybe to bore into a system that allows, if not fosters, such events.

With that, Sharper Objects has much the vibe of its HBO cousin True Detective, with a murder that motivates the story in the here and now, while implicating that the rabbit hole goes to deeper and more disturbing places than our initial glimpse reveals. It also, like that show, wraps that investigation up in the personal, as Camille returns home and jostles once again with her mother, Adora, with no small amount of tension and bad blood floating in the background of every interaction between them.

And yet, “Vanish” is just as concerned, if a little more opaque, with what happened in the past as what happened in the present. The episode gradually unspools the fact that Camille had a sister, Marian, that she was close to, who died. It communicates the notion that Camille and Marian had some refuge with one another from their mother, who had certain expectations and her own compulsions that weighed hard on her daughters. In its first hour, the miniseries is laudably content to hint at this dynamic, give it to us in dribs and drabs to where the feeling is as slowly present for us as it is for Camille.

At the same time, in the most elliptical aspect of this opening salvo, Sharp Objects hints that there’s a trauma in Camille’s past as a girl that is connected, spiritually if not literally, to what’s befallen the poor dead young women who brought her back to this place. Flashes of what looks like a rape den, images of her being intimidated and chased in the woods, all gesture toward some past incident that brought her perilously close to sharing the fate of those girls. That trauma seems to steep and mingle with the loss of her sister, coalescing into a cold ball of past pains that Camille seeks to drown in liquor to suppress.

All the while, there is a richness to “Vanish” that portends intriguing things for the rest of the eight-episode series. The first episode taps into the fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, and the friction between meeting the mutual expectations of that bond and trying to slough them off. There are hints at themes of female sexuality and presentation, both performative and private. There’s the sense of generational echoes, the way that towns age but the ills and pain points can linger from one era to the next.

And there’s the aim to escape the inescapable. That comes literally in the case of how Windgap somehow manages to bring its prodigal daughter back into the fold, but figuratively in how Camille’s unspokenly momentous exit did not rid her of the scars she suffered there.

In the golden hour shadows of that place, those scars ache anew. As the sound drips from her speakers as distraction and respite, trying to block it out, she is nevertheless reminded of what she tried to run from. As the spirits flow from bottle to lip, and past to present, there is the effort to numb, to neutralize, to forget. But returned to the place where such wounds were first inflicted, where such losses were suffered, no palliative can stifle that dull roar, vibrating in every rock and tree, reverberating through a town that still silently acknowledges the sound, and echoing in a house that long ago ceased to be a home, but still holds such power.