Roush Review: A Bloody Good Twist on Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’

Carrie

Matt's Rating:

If the idea of messing with horror classics makes your blood run cold, you might want to steer clear of Mike Flanagan‘s body of work. In his breakthrough adaptations of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor (from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher for Netflix, he spun baroque variations on the most basic of shivery premises, confounding purists while delighting a new generation of creep-show devotees with what often felt like entirely new stories.

The Stephen King specialist (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck) is at it again with his elaborate take on Carrie. Flanagan’s eight-part treatment hews closer than one might expect to the source material of King’s beloved blockbuster first novel — which has already inspired four films (including Brian DePalma’s definitive 1976 version) and a miniseries — while expanding the scope significantly to add historical context to the plight of Carrie White (the terrific Summer H. Howell), the sheltered and bullied teenager with tremendously destructive telekinetic gifts.

Robert Falconer/Prime

This Carrie pulls you in immediately, not unlike King’s book, with a framework of recorded testimonies from witnesses and survivors of the climactic prom-pocalypse that left hundreds dead, the town of Chamberlain, USA in ruins and a lingering mystery as to who was this strange, fragile yet lethal girl. Was Carrie a victim? A hero? A monster? Depends on who you ask. For Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), the popular good girl who tried to get to know the lonely waif, “She was my friend.” As Sue is desperate to remind her enigmatic interrogator, “We were kids.”

Kids, yes, but children, hardly. With the exception of the guileless Carrie, who until her father’s untimely death in a construction accident was raised and cloistered in her modest home. Forced by social services to attend school for the first time while her militantly pious mother Margaret (a chilling Samantha Sloyan) goes to work in the outside world, sophomore Carrie is plunged into a modern and for her overwhelming environment of cell phones, social media, public displays of affection and alarming active-shooter lockdown drills. What she really isn’t prepared for, though, is the flippant cruelty of her peers, especially Alpha Mean Girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton).

To Flanagan’s credit, the villains in this story tend to be surprisingly complicated. Chris is a malicious spoiled brat from the get-go, but in some ways, she’s no less sad and scared than her nemesis Carrie. Feeling abandoned by her parents’ divorce and her family’s dwindling finances, she sees the future she envisioned for herself slipping away and finds a conveniently easy target for her despair in a misfit like Carrie. (Too bad for her that Carrie has an even more brutal way of getting back at her tormentors, once she learns how to control it.)

Likewise, Carrie’s mom Margaret is far from the usual characterization of the deranged zealot. Sloyan, a Flanagan regular, makes this newly widowed recluse’s distrust and contempt for debauched society and feckless authority tangible — although I didn’t buy her rather sudden transformation into an online and very public activist when things get overheated at the high school. She achieves a tragic dimension as her protective love for her daughter curdles into a fearful reckoning with Carrie’s budding powers.

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The real revelation, though, and as it should be, is Howell’s multifaceted Carrie, convincing as a childlike innocent, poignantly hopeful until confronted with the malignant nature of so many of her classmates. This corruption slowly seeps into her soul, and once she recognizes the magnitude of her psychic gift-curse, egged on by a sidekick (Thalia Dudek) who soon becomes a tiresomely obvious plot device, Carrie contradicts her declaration to a sympathetic guidance counselor that, “I don’t do scary.”

Turns out she does, once Carrie learns to relish and hone her nascent powers at school, at home and the world at large. Flanagan has an expansive vision for his heroine, suggesting this could be the first part of a trilogy. Though not immune from the bloat of his previous adaptations — a subplot about a toxic meme account that sparks a high-school riot goes on way too long – Flanagan’s Carrie makes the best argument yet that her story doesn’t have to end with the blood-soaked Prom from Hell. Which, it must be said, adds some flourishes that will stay with me for quite some time.

At least until Halloween.

Carrie, Series Premiere (eight episodes), Wednesday, October 7, Prime Video