Mike Flanagan has long been lauded as a modern horror maestro, so it will come as no surprise that his adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie” is exceptional. What might be surprising, though, is why his latest foray into King’s nightmares stands out the way that it does.
Flanagan — acting as both showrunner and frequent director here — has always been open about the fact his version of the story is very different from King’s original text. What’s interesting, though, is that he goes well beyond contemporizing “Carrie” (which has a modern setting, 52 years after the original novel). This isn’t just “what if Chris Hargensen had a cell phone?” That would be a sufficient cruelty on its own, of course, but Flanagan’s never been one to settle for sufficient.
Instead he opts for a modern day blitzkrieg that attacks Carrie White from all sides, exploring not just the contemporary hell that it is to be a girl in high school, but the present-day warzones we send our children to.
We immediately see Carrie’s (Summer H. Howell) innocence used as a tool to break through the societal numbness toward what have become everyday atrocities. To her confusion, she has to walk through a metal detector on her first day of school. Next, there’s an active shooter drill that leaves the sheltered girl paralyzed with fear. Shortly after, Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) tells an enraged Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) that “they’ve been doing this since grade school.” At which point Carrie’s mother can only smile angrily and whisper, “What a horrific thing to say.”
It sounds so simple, of course. We constantly tell ourselves and our peers not to become numb to the atrocities that take place in our schools (and our malls, and our churches, and our concerts…). But we do and we have, and there is something so striking about seeing someone completely sheltered from it react to how gun violence has proliferated our day to day lives.
These themes loom large over the season, with Chris’ (Alison Thornton) standard bullying and Sue’s (Siena Agudong) familiar complicity running along in tandem with the horrors. Themes, though, are nothing without the foundation of performance and screenwriting. We’ve already celebrated Flanagan’s contributions, but thousands of words could be written about the performances of Howell and Sloyan as Carrie and Margaret alone. This is far from Howell’s first credit. She celebrates a significant tenure in the genre sphere already, but what comes out of her as Carrie White is something new altogether. It’s hard to remain believable when you’re expected to shift from kind to furious to terrified to powerful on a dime, but Howell proved she was more than up to the task.
Sloyan has been a longtime collaborator of Flanagan’s. Each new story drags something different out of the actor, and she’s frequently celebrated as the best performance in a small sea of exceptional talent in each of their dealings, but Margaret White is in a different league. Prime Video’s “Carrie” slightly softens some aspects of the telekinetic’s mother, but what they choose to make gentler only makes her cruelty more horrific. There was no better choice for the role than Sam Sloyan, who gives a career-best performance here.
While Howell and Sloyan are notable standouts, there simply isn’t a bad performance in the bunch. This should be a tall order, given the nuances that seem to exist with each character. Everyone’s concerned (the genuine kind, not the “aw, poor her” kind), nearly all of them are complicit, and very few do anything at all. Well deserved supporting shoutouts go to Lillard, Amber Midthunder’s Rita, Michael Trucco’s sleazy Mr. Hargensen, and Tim Bagley’s kindly counselor, Mr. Morten, but everyone involved should be patting themselves on the back.
Set design might have been an afterthought under a different showrunner, especially given how much time we spend in individual houses. Every detail matters in a Flanagan joint though, and “Carrie” is no exception. Each room in each of the respective homes of the teens matters, and the attention to detail quietly elevates the mundane in a way that many wouldn’t miss but is appreciated all the same. Oh, and there’s a De Palma Retrospective marquee on main street that acts as a nice little nod to the very first “Carrie” adaptation.
Similarly essential but equally understated is the Newton Brothers’ score. It’s there to quietly build emotion in the way that you’d expect it to, but it never crowds the soundtrack which both plays a bigger role than in Flanagan’s previous work and also happens to be an absolute banger. Hats off to music supervisor Justine von Winterfeldt, who really cooked here.
Flanagan’s biggest trick with “Carrie” is also his least expected: what if the quintessential ending that we’ve all known over these last five decades wasn’t really the end at all? The blood rains down on Carrie White not in the final episode, but the penultimate, soaking the girl desperately clinging to her last shred of kindness while holding back her jaw dropping power. It’s at this moment that you realize that every change, from Tommy’s (Joel Oulette) shift in motivation when it came to asking Carrie to the prom to the introduction of the original character Emaline (Thalia Dudek) was preparing the audience for something new entirely.
There’s a strong chance that “something new” is divisive, and not because of purist frustrations over adaptive liberties. “Carrie” doesn’t end in a cliffhanger so much as it ends with a hefty dose of nuance and a lot of unanswered questions. But Carrie White isn’t the only telekenetic in the world, and she’s far from the only one with the shine. Exploring what the world looks like in the aftermath of her chaos is certainly intriguing, if you have the patience and trust for it. When it comes to television, no one has earned that trust more than Flanagan.
Though it’d be a pity not to play longer in this universe, “Carrie” stands entirely on its own if you can handle the open ended ideas presented at the end of the series. Everything that leads to that showcases Flanagan’s trademark care and his longstanding stable of actors deliver in all the ways we know they can alongside Flanafam newcomers like Howell and Agudong.
The contemporization experiment for Carrie White’s story is a resounding success backed up by a banger soundtrack and sufficient teen angst.
“Carrie” premieres Wednesday, Oct. 7, on Prime Video.
The post ‘Carrie’ Review: Mike Flanagan Brilliantly Turns Stephen King’s Nightmare Into a Horrific Teen TV Series appeared first on TheWrap.
