Hard to assign this series a number of stars, some aspects 10, others 1.
The acting was stellar, making the characters believable in their almost unprecedentedly dysfunctional family crucible.
And kudos to the way cinematography and editing created the most vivid 'inside' view of the mental tortures of PTSD that I know of on film, paralleling the way that A Beautiful Mind put us inside the mental labyrinths of paranoid schizophrenia. (For those commenters who have complained here about the erratic and incessant flashbacks, literally "flash" backs, and found them inexplicable, this would be my response: you were seeing a depiction of the manifestation of PTSD. Imagine how anguishing then it is for an actual PTSD sufferer plagued by all such 'cuts' and slices of trauma bombarding their mental visions, unrelentingly.)
But the artistry which achieved that depiction of PTSD is also a disjunct with the series ending where even more frenetic, barely visible cutting and slicing of flashes of violence -- seeming to be in the same vein as Camille's PTSD that we've been immersed into, racheted up in the splicings into the final credits as if on steroids, cannot serve the same purpose (in terms of the medium being the message) and thus left me with a sour end note as to director's choices. Those mid-closing- credits scenes were not illustrations of the workings of PTSD; they struck me (and my husband) instead as kind of cheap shortcut twists to stab us, the viewer with, so as to shake us up regarding what had seemed to be the series' final verdict on its crimes and punishments. Those cinematic/editing choices rode in on the backs of Camille's PTSD depictions, so to speak, but they violated the exclusive use of those choices up to that point for illustrating PTSD. These could not plausibly (story perspective wise) be Amma's PTSD, they were instead a break away into some "omniscient narrator" visuals. And while the series did put us into the POV of multiple characters, including Amma, that never included entering into anyone else's but Camille's PTSD-flashback experience/sensations.
So that attempted conflating of a use of a film-editing 'device' to illustrate PTSD and then in the last frames of the whole film to use that same 'device' for some wholly other purpose was, for me, a sort of sabotage.
And perhaps also a degree of disrespect for the story and/or the viewer to relegate such a story twist to a barely recognizable insertion mid-final-credits. Other films have deftly left us with final twists that 'owned' themselves, for one thing by coming before final credits - films for example that leave us with some micro last-minute filmed focus on a detail that changes everything, such as making us know that we'd been watching someone's dream rather than 'reality' - "Mulholland Drive" and "Take Shelter" come to mind. Their endings then became controversial fare for folks like us to debate as to what their ramifications and implications were for reframing the entire film's plotline, but that works. Sharp Object's post-ending ending just felt shortchanged and inappropriate to the film's chosen form-function schema.
(It also felt a bit cheap storytelling-wise to have Adora, in her very last extended scene with Camille, segue into a bit of her own backstory to telegraph to the viewer that she came by her dysfunctions "legitimately" i.e., handed down by her own mother to her. I would suspect that the novel did not wait until the last minute to weave that message into the telling.)
As an aside, viscerally, the hardest thing in the film for me was getting my mind around Camille's cutting. Most specifically, was she supposed to have engaged, at least sometimes in 'collaborative cutting' à la tattooing? How could she have 'achieved' those cuttings into her back? Unlike tattooing, which is inherently social, cutting is a very isolationist dis-ease; it felt disrespectful of the viewer not to give any kind of accounting for how those backside word-cuts could have happened, thus leaving it in the realm of implausibility.
The acting was stellar, making the characters believable in their almost unprecedentedly dysfunctional family crucible.
And kudos to the way cinematography and editing created the most vivid 'inside' view of the mental tortures of PTSD that I know of on film, paralleling the way that A Beautiful Mind put us inside the mental labyrinths of paranoid schizophrenia. (For those commenters who have complained here about the erratic and incessant flashbacks, literally "flash" backs, and found them inexplicable, this would be my response: you were seeing a depiction of the manifestation of PTSD. Imagine how anguishing then it is for an actual PTSD sufferer plagued by all such 'cuts' and slices of trauma bombarding their mental visions, unrelentingly.)
But the artistry which achieved that depiction of PTSD is also a disjunct with the series ending where even more frenetic, barely visible cutting and slicing of flashes of violence -- seeming to be in the same vein as Camille's PTSD that we've been immersed into, racheted up in the splicings into the final credits as if on steroids, cannot serve the same purpose (in terms of the medium being the message) and thus left me with a sour end note as to director's choices. Those mid-closing- credits scenes were not illustrations of the workings of PTSD; they struck me (and my husband) instead as kind of cheap shortcut twists to stab us, the viewer with, so as to shake us up regarding what had seemed to be the series' final verdict on its crimes and punishments. Those cinematic/editing choices rode in on the backs of Camille's PTSD depictions, so to speak, but they violated the exclusive use of those choices up to that point for illustrating PTSD. These could not plausibly (story perspective wise) be Amma's PTSD, they were instead a break away into some "omniscient narrator" visuals. And while the series did put us into the POV of multiple characters, including Amma, that never included entering into anyone else's but Camille's PTSD-flashback experience/sensations.
So that attempted conflating of a use of a film-editing 'device' to illustrate PTSD and then in the last frames of the whole film to use that same 'device' for some wholly other purpose was, for me, a sort of sabotage.
And perhaps also a degree of disrespect for the story and/or the viewer to relegate such a story twist to a barely recognizable insertion mid-final-credits. Other films have deftly left us with final twists that 'owned' themselves, for one thing by coming before final credits - films for example that leave us with some micro last-minute filmed focus on a detail that changes everything, such as making us know that we'd been watching someone's dream rather than 'reality' - "Mulholland Drive" and "Take Shelter" come to mind. Their endings then became controversial fare for folks like us to debate as to what their ramifications and implications were for reframing the entire film's plotline, but that works. Sharp Object's post-ending ending just felt shortchanged and inappropriate to the film's chosen form-function schema.
(It also felt a bit cheap storytelling-wise to have Adora, in her very last extended scene with Camille, segue into a bit of her own backstory to telegraph to the viewer that she came by her dysfunctions "legitimately" i.e., handed down by her own mother to her. I would suspect that the novel did not wait until the last minute to weave that message into the telling.)
As an aside, viscerally, the hardest thing in the film for me was getting my mind around Camille's cutting. Most specifically, was she supposed to have engaged, at least sometimes in 'collaborative cutting' à la tattooing? How could she have 'achieved' those cuttings into her back? Unlike tattooing, which is inherently social, cutting is a very isolationist dis-ease; it felt disrespectful of the viewer not to give any kind of accounting for how those backside word-cuts could have happened, thus leaving it in the realm of implausibility.