“Closer” is the equivalent of all of Sharp Objects’ carefully laid details, no matter how minute, being thrown together with a whole lot of social terror and tossed into a pressure cooker. This episode is set-up after set-up for all the chips in Wind Gap to come crashing down. Ultimately, they don’t, at least not on a grand scale, which makes sense with three episodes still to go. But then two fairly small moments at the end deliver the payoff to all that tension, just after Sharp Objects lulls us back into a sense of safety and security.
Perhaps most remarkably, this entry builds on everything that made last week’s episode the best yet, and gets even more playful with the show’s small-town setting. Between the tough interactions while the family goes shopping for clothes for Wind Gap’s big holiday celebration and the elongated uneasiness of said festivities that take up most of the episode, director Jean-Marc Vallee is in full Big Little Lies mode here, capturing just about every judgmental little glance from every minor member of the town that HBO’s hour-long timeslot will allow.
Source: IGN.com Sharp Objects Episode 5 is Brutal in the Most Subtle Ways