This fall marks exactly 50 years since Brian de Palma’s film of Carrie hit theaters. The movie followed Stephen King’s novel fairly quickly, and while the book garnered respectful reviews, it was the film that put King’s name out into pop culture.
Since then, the story has inspired a bad TV movie from the 1990s, a flawed remake from 2013, and an unjustly maligned Broadway musical that remains one of the biggest flops in theater history. Now it’s become a limited Amazon Prime TV series, and the question is: Are there eight 50-minute episodes’ worth of material in the story? Watching Carrie’s high-school classmates brutalize her for most of that running time is more than I want to take, frankly. The good news is that the TV series created by King specialist Mike Flanagan does a pretty good job of avoiding that. The bad news, well …
Let’s go back to the good, which there is a lot of. Summer H. Howell takes over the role of Carrietta White, and the 22-year-old Canadian appears closer to 12, which makes the heroine seem that much more vulnerable. If she doesn’t have the alien qualities of the OG Carrie, Sissy Spacek, she imbues the character with an eagerness to learn about the world that she’s been kept from that earned the praise of Spacek herself.
Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) might remain dull, but the end of his relationship with Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) comes about far more naturally after a pregnancy scare, so that he doesn’t wind up taking Carrie to the prom out of pity. Carrie’s also given a friend in Emaline (Thalia Dudek), a new character who does not appear in any previous version of the story. While the butch and bleached-blonde Emaline initially appears to be a malign influence on Carrie, encouraging her to use her powers to destroy, the revelation about her in Episode 5 is a diabolical touch worthy of King himself.
The bullying is updated for our age, as Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton, whose resting bitch face is something you won’t soon forget) invents a fake Instagram account under the name of “Carrie Red,” where students are free to anonymously cyberbully not only Carrie but any other student or faculty member, including one teacher (Rahul Kohli) who is repeatedly called a pedophile. Much like Regina George, Chris is clever enough to insert some disparaging posts about herself to deflect suspicions that she is the account’s creator. Nevertheless, Carrie’s mother (Samantha Sloyan), who becomes social media-savvy in an awful hurry, takes to the platform to out Chris as Carrie Red. Margaret White is here rendered as something more than a one-dimensional religious maniac. She’s a voice of sanity, albeit only when it comes to the school bullying.
The resulting scandal leads to a riot outside the high school where the principal (a well-cast Matthew Lillard) is clubbed in the head, Sue is punched in the mouth after trying to defuse the situation, and Chris herself is chased through the parking lot by a lynch mob. Flanagan and his writers do exceptionally well by the adult behaviors that the kids mimic: Chris’ treatment of her fellow students mirrors her alpha-male embezzler of a father (Michael Trucco) while her mother (dear God, that’s Heather Graham) watches helplessly, and Rita Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) takes a little too much pleasure in punishing the girls for the famous shower bullying of Carrie by making them run suicide sprints until they drop. Carrie’s hometown is depicted skillfully as a community that becomes so dysfunctional that the massacre at the prom seems to be the only logical conclusion to the story.
So why on earth does Flanagan abandon all that in the series finale? To be certain, nothing he did was ever likely to top the jump scare at the end of de Palma’s film. Even so, the show doesn’t just fall at the final hurdle. It faceplants. Not only does the last episode feel like it belongs to a different, lesser series, it also ruins the revelation about Emaline with an unnecessary twist. We would have been much better off staying behind in Chamberlain and having the survivors try to put their lives back together after all those deaths. The conclusion of Carrie doesn’t undo the show’s many accomplishments, but what a shame it ends the way it does.
