Sharp Objects spoilers ahead!
HBO’s Sharp Objects was a mini series with a purpose. Ostensibly, it was a murder mystery concerning the brutal deaths of two young girls from Wind Gap, Missouri. We meet Camille Preaker, a journalist who’s been assigned to cover the murders in Wind Gap. It’s her hometown, and even though she’s spent her entire adult life getting away from it, she accepts the assignment and returns. She’s forced to relive old traumas, and over the course of eight episodes, it becomes increasingly clear why she left in the first place. This is a diseased, decaying place, where memories are long and gossip runs wild.
In the final episode, Camille’s mother Adora is arrested for the murders; we learn Adora suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy (seeking attention and validation through the care of another, whose ills you inflict upon them) and also poisoned Camille’s younger sister, Marian, years prior. She might have killed Camille’s other younger sister, Amma, had Camille not intervened.
And then, in the last 60 seconds of the final episode, the show pulls the rug out from under us. Amma is the real killer. She just killed another little girl. And she used the dead girls’ teeth–after pulling them out with pliers–to line the floor in her dollhouse.
What. The. Hell.
But as abrupt and as awful as this was, it was a fair twist; the show had planted multiple hints, both practical and thematic, throughout all eight episodes. Here are nine clues that you probably missed the first time around, gathered from Reddit, social media, and our own analysis. This is a show that rewards repeated viewings–if you have the stomach for it.
1. Serial Sneak
The show establishes, early on, that Amma is not a suspect, which means, to any seasoned mystery fan, that she should be a top suspect.
Her mother saw her as a sweet little girl. The town saw her as Adora’s favorite, perfect daughter. The sheriff tipped his hat whenever she roller skated by. And that trust, which everyone took for granted, gave Amma free reign and access to sneak out of the house, kill the girls, pose a body in an alleyway, and hide another victim’s bike on the Preaker pig farm (which of course, she has access to).
Amma was the only main character who had the time to commit both murders, and the privacy to do so without anyone being the wiser. And she revealed, early on, that she’s not so innocent; Camille got a peak at her darker, controlling, bullying side when they ran into each other at the gas station in Episode 2. Amma was unbelievably cruel to her sister, to the point that Camille was shocked by her duplicity.
2. Don’t Touch The Dollhouse
The dollhouse was so disturbing because it was hiding in plain sight. It’s the first thing Amma showed Camille, and it thematically reinforces Adora’s protectiveness; she wanted to keep Amma as her little dress-up doll, who relied on her for every need.
But more subtly, the dollhouse reinforced how controlling Amma was over the people in her life, especially her victims.. And whenever someone, such as Camille or Adora, approached or tried to touch the dollhouse, notice how Amma always grabbed their hands and shot them a dirty look. Lots of serial killers keep trophies or mementos of their killings. Amma collected teeth, and she used them to create an “ivory” floor in her dollhouse that she couldn’t allow anyone to discover.
3. The Ivory Floor
Speaking of the ivory floor, we might have guessed that something was up with it. Adora spent a whole scene explaining the ivory floor to Detective Willis; an expository treatment given to no other area of the house, With Amma being so picky and specific about the fabric of her dollhouse’s mini-bedspreads, it made sense that she would show a similar meticulousness to the house’s most extravagant, infamous feature. And with ivory now illegal, another tusk-like substance, like a little girl’s teeth, would have to do.
Some additional foreshadowing: Camille, both as a woman and in flashbacks as a teenager, seemed scared of the room, almost as if she sensed some awful secret or presence inside. But she should have been more frightened of the miniature replica.
4. Subtle Confessions
Several times throughout the series, Amma said thing that were, in retrospect, loaded with double meaning. She usually did this when she was either high or drunk, when her guard was down. In this particular screenshot from Episode 3, Amma was telling Camille how much her two girlfriends love her: “They’d do anything for me. I just ask.” It turned out to be true; they held Amma’s first two victims down while she choked them out.
Other verbal semi-confessions: In Episode 5, Amma confided to Camille: “Sometimes, when I show off in front of my friends, I get carried away.” In Episode 8, while under the influence of her mother’s poison, she imagined herself as Persephone, queen of the Underworld in Greek mythology. How on-the-nose can you get?
5. Matching Poses
Both Amma and the second victim, Natalie Keene, were seated in identical, doll-like poses by window sills–the latter in Episode 1 and the former in Episode 5. It was a meta allusion that the characters weren’t aware of. Amma looked like a doll throughout the series, with her hands crossed behind her back and her flouncy, childish dresses. To then make a thematic leap to Natalie, who Detective Willis described as being posed like a “prop or doll,” was not too difficult.
The first time watching, because we don’t suspect Amma, we saw this posing as possible foreshadowing that Amma might be a future victim. In retrospect, it highlighted Amma’s jealousy. She wanted to be her mother’s sole doll and plaything. And when Natalie got in the way of that, she had to die. The identical pose is symbolic of Amma taking her power back from the girl she killed.
6. A “Funny” Hanging
Not much to say here. Serial killers usually have a modus operandi, a ritualized manner of murdering that stays consistent from victim to victim. Amma favored choking her victims to death. In this shot from the final episode, Amma showed her future victim, Mae (foreground), how she was going to kill her. In fact, if you watched the mid-credits kill montage carefully, you could see that this was the exact alleyway where Mae met her untimely demise.
7. “The Cool Girls”
The amount of casual mean girl stuff that Amma and her two friends pulled while roller skating around town should have set off an alarm bell. They were always giggling about the murders or about the speculation surrounding them. Two notable incidents stood out. When Camille warned them in Episode 2 to be careful because there’s someone killing little girls, one of them smugly said that none of the “cool girls” were being killed. Of course they could skate around with a killer on the loose; they had nothing to fear from themselves.
In Episode 7, when the sheriff warned two of the girls to be careful of men who might hit them with their cars, one of them replied, “Or she. Don’t be sexist, chief.” It’s ironic that the same Southern culture, which treats women as gentle flowers incapable of violence, was also complicit in covering for these three girls’ ghastly crimes.
8. Revisiting The Crime Scene
Whenever there’s a crime of passion (or a deliberate destruction of property, such as an arson), law enforcement keeps an eye out for a suspect at the scene of the crime–someone who is overly interested in the case or is lingering about, taking in the destruction from all angles. It’s a psychological thrill for some criminals to see their handiwork and assess the damage they’ve caused.
When Natalie Keene’s body is discovered, the three girls were right there, on roller skates, to witness everyone else’s grief. Of course John Keene was there as well; he was family, which automatically made him a suspect. But we learned, over the course of the next several episodes, that John did not have the stomach for this kind of work. And at that point, we should have considered the girls more carefully.
9. Matching Outfits
And lastly, notice that Amma and her victims shared color schemes. Ann Nash’s bike, which was fished out of the water on the Preaker property in Episode 6, had a bicycle seat that was white and covered with blue flowers. We saw Amma wearing the same colors in Episode 4. Amma’s dress on Calhoun Day in Episode 5 was the same dress that Mae was wearing in Episode 8.
Again, when we first see these matching colors, we assume the show is foreshadowing how much danger Amma is in. But the truth is far more sinister; Amma intended to kill these girls, because she craved the attention they received from Adora and Camille; she felt, in her mind, that she was being replaced as the girl who was most loved and most admired. One pretty doll for another.
Why did we, along with the citizens of Wind Gap, consistently give Amma a pass? She was young, pretty, and charismatic; there were more externally broken, obvious suspects who were easier to blame. The show intended for us to blame Wind Gap for not seeing the truth in front of them. But the show worked equally hard to ensure that its viewers share that blame as well.
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