She seemed too good to be true. And she was.
Sandra walked into Tom’s bookstore like a romcom cliché, wearing a springtime dress and a summertime smile. She asked for a hardcover copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. When her credit card was rejected, Tom gave her the book and told her she could pay him later—and she did. And then she let Tom take her out for dinner.
She said she was a Vassar graduate, working on her Ph.D. at New York University. (In English lit, of course.) She let slip small quotes from books and confessed a love for Jane Eyre. And when Tom showed her a signed first edition of Charlotte Bronte’s classic, she almost swooned into his arms then and there.
But as the weeks wear on, Tom learns more.
Sandra’s parents died when she was young. She and her brother knocked around in the foster care system, and her brother came out the worse for it. He’s often high, often angry and—now—always scared. He owes money: $350,000, in fact. Sandra doesn’t have it. Who does? But she just might be able to scrounge up enough cash to help him run—run fast, run far, run to safety for a bit.
Tom disagrees. “You have to pay them off,” he tells Sandra. Give them the $350,000. Give her brother a true fresh start.
But how? Sandra doesn’t have that kind of cash. And Tom—well, that’s sweet and all, but he surely doesn’t make that much working at a bookstore.
“I own a bookstore,” Tom confesses. Turns out, his father is rich—so rich that $350,000 might be somewhere in the sofa cushions.
Sandra refuses the help, but Tom insists. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says. He’ll withdraw the money and give it to her. She’ll give it to her brother’s dealers. And after it’s all done, they can meet at that Japanese restaurant they both like.
But as Tom waits, Sandra doesn’t show. When Tom goes to her apartment and pounds on her door, there’s no answer.
Sandra seemed too good to be true. And she was. But in this story, Sandra’s duplicity is just the beginning. Hers is only the first in a nesting doll’s layers of lies. And the end game isn’t just thousands of dollars. It’s billions.
Sharper is predicated on people lying, cheating and stealing. You’re probably not going to find someone here that you can point to and say, “Now that’s a role model.”
So instead of a person, let’s point to the philanthropic organization in play here—one that has done, and can do, some good in the world if all the pieces fall in place. And the guy who heads that philanthropy seems interested in doing some good, too.
The very first shot of the movie depicts a miniature version of Michelangelo’s Pieta, a statue of Mary holding and cradling her crucified son, Jesus. That’s the last reference we have to anything spiritual at all.
A man trains Sandra in the art of deception. When he first brings her to his apartment, the woman believes he might try to seduce or rape her—an impression that grows stronger when he asks her to take off her shoes. But no. It seems he wants to train Sandra to seduce other people. In a sort of twisted version of My Fair Lady, he asks his project to flirt with a guy at a hotel bar and get him to invite her up to his room. She’s successful, and the married mark clearly wants to sleep with Sandra. But their rendezvous is interrupted before things go past a few light kisses.
We see several other pairings involving kissing, foreplay and (apparently) post-coital bedroom conversations. A woman presses a man’s hand to her covered breasts as she straddles him. A woman is seen in her underwear, and eveningwear reveals shoulder and cleavage. People seduce marks—often sleeping with them to preserve the ruse.
A woman mentions her wife and kids. We hear one or two obscene references to oral sex. A replica of the Venus de Milo (the topless female Greek statue missing its arms) is seen. We hear that one of Sandra’s professors coined the word “vaginization” to describe German literature. One of Tom’s friends refers to Sandra as a “sexy librarian or something.”
[Spoiler Warning] A woman and man pretend to be mother and son. When they’re revealed to be lovers instead, the tang of incest still lingers.
Someone is apparently shot and killed: The gunshot is accompanied by a spray of blood, and a pool forms around the body. Another character dies of natural causes (off camera).
Several people yell, scream and violently pound on doors—the threat of physical violence just a whisker away. We hear about a guy who suffered a number of broken bones at the hands of his creditors. People slap others.
Nearly 65 f-words and about 10 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s name is misused five times (including twice with the word “d–n”). Jesus’ name is abused at least once.
When Sandra is quizzed by her parole officer whether she’s used drugs recently, the woman eventually admits she smoked marijuana earlier. Later, when Sandra falls under the influence of a conman, he inspects her arms and feet for needle marks. She has none, but she later seems clearly under the influence of something much stronger than marijuana. Her “friend” demands that she quit. “I need you clean,” he says.
A heroin addict spends several days in a swanky apartment, apparently going through withdrawal. A man shows up at a party and drinks heavily. He denies being on drugs, though, and he urinates in a fancy crystal decanter to prove it. (He challenges someone to get the urine, which we see, tested.) We hear about other people’s drug problems.
Wine, beer and champagne are quaffed. A man asks Sandra if she likes martinis. Sandra entices a guy at a bar by telling him that she hates drinking alone. A bar is a popular meeting place.
Sharper helpfully gives us a dictionary definition of its title from the get-go: “One who lives by their wits.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary is even more succinct: “A cheat.”
By that definition, almost everyone we meet here would meet it. Lies are practically as common as words, and betrayal as normal as rush-hour traffic.
Even those who are not explicitly cheating are not above bribery and demeaning their own family members. People steal money and jewelry and entire estates.
Apple TV+’s Sharper aims to keep you guessing. Who’s lying? Who’s scheming? Are the cheaters cheating the cheaters? And is someone else cheating them?
And as morally vapid as the plot sounds (and is), I get the attraction. There’s something darkly appealing about watching clever con-people who are themselves cleverly conned. From The Sting to The Grifters to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Hollywood itself has turned bad behavior into box-office gold. And in a way, movies such as Sharper offer a bit of a moral in their immorality. “All who take the sword will perish by the sword,” Jesus told us in Matthew 26:52. And those who live by the “sharp” might fall on their own pointed plots.
But while it can be fun to anticipate a movie’s duplicitous twists and turns, Sharper gives us so much duplicity and so many characters on the con that figuring out who to root for devolves into an exercise in moral relativism. And this is to say nothing of the insincere sexual trysts or the frequent profanity or the film’s dalliance into drugs.
Sharper is, indeed, sharply written and sharply acted. And it’s reflective of another meaning in its name: Its characters play on the edge of a blade, and no one makes it out without a wound or two. But that just might include the viewer.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
