For a treacherously long while, director Jean-Marc Vallee’s eight-part HBO limited series “Sharp Objects,” based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, soaks up atmosphere and points all 10 fingers at a slew of shifty-eyed murder suspects, while Amy Adams (as newspaper reporter Camille Preaker, dogged by a nightmarish personal history) drives around her boot-heel Missouri hometown swigging vodka out of a water bottle.
She copes with a serious case of the flashbacks. Vallee, lately of “Big Little Lies” and the director of “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” lives for this sort of thing — in this case, fleeting, sinister visual memories of the protagonist’s damaged upbringing in the fictional town of Wind Gap.
Adams is terrific, though, even when doing very little. In recent years the actress has revealed and developed a remarkable range, tamping down her surface ebullience (that’s what comes from doing dinner theater in suburban Minneapolis) and tapping into quieter, subtler shadings in films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.”
In “Sharp Objects” her technique is nearly invisible, as if by instinct; Flynn’s story, after all, is laden with serial-killer tropes and Southern Gothic flourishes, and doesn’t need much competition. In a tale dependent on tense two-person encounters, Adams pairs off beautifully with Patricia Clarkson, as her highly controlling mother, the richest woman in Wind Gap; Chris Messina, the laconic Kansas City detective on the case, at odds with local law enforcement; and Eliza Scanlen, sharp and taunting as Camille’s young half-sister, roller-skating through her own mess of an adolescence.