‘Carrie’ Prime Video Review: In Mike Flanagan’s Hands, Stephen King’s Prom Night Tragedy Becomes A Social Media Cautionary Tale

At this point in his career, Mike Flanagan can fairly be called the filmmaker most closely tied to Stephen King’s world. He has spent a good part of his career remaking and expanding the author’s work, from Gerald’s Game to The Life of Chuck, by way of Doctor Sleep. None of those adaptations ranks among his most inspired work (Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House are better on that score), but there’s no question King runs through everything he does, even when he isn’t adapting one of his books. Now, with Carrie, he takes on his biggest challenge yet, since the novel and the original film sit among the most canonical entries in King’s catalog. Taking them apart and putting them back together is like, well, playing with fire.

And yet here goes Flanagan, taking the bullets that will surely come from Brian De Palma’s fans and from those who consider the book and the original film sacred texts. Without getting fundamentalist about it, the people who say there’s no point in turning Carrie into a series have a bit of a case. Sometimes the good and the familiar is enough. With those prejudices in mind, it has to be said that Carrie is far from bad. Flanagan finds a way to expand the story by bringing in themes and concerns of his own that have surfaced in his other series and films, and by exploring contemporary issues that the novel and the original film, both products of the 1970s, couldn’t have imagined.

This is a Carrie for the age of social media, religious fundamentalism and school shootings, which is another way of saying that the problems facing the protagonist of the novel and the original film have grown considerably. This XXL version changes some things, keeps others, expands and adds here and there, but by and large it stays faithful to the themes of the original. If bullying was a shameful problem half a century ago, today it’s a way of life that can even help some people win elections.

The main change is the central character. The show’s Carrie is quite different from Sissy Spacek’s. She isn’t a mysterious, eccentric girl removed from nearly everything. The character conceived by Flanagan and played by Summer H. Howell is, despite her past experiences, her confinement and her homeschooling (here, Carrie has no contact with the real world until preadolescence), fairly kind, calm and only a little shy. Her main problem is that she knows nothing about the world or how to relate to other girls, and that is what will ultimately bring her world crashing down.

The series makes some changes right from the start, and not only in period. Everything begins with the accidental death of the father, which reveals the existence of Carrie and her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), who have lived almost without leaving the house. In this version they aren’t merely religious but the kind of family that buys into every conspiracy theory going and prepares as if to cut off all contact with anything or anyone outside. But once the father dies, the state forces the mother to send Carrie to school and, clearly, the girl isn’t ready for that bloodbath. Neither is her mother.

The series expands the role of Carrie’s friends, her enemies, the «bad kids» we all know and, above all, the relationship each of them has with their parents. This Carrie is a show about the kind of cruelty that runs through the classrooms and hallways of high schools, a cruelty that social media has grown exponentially, but more than anything it’s a story about the conflicts that come from having a bad relationship with your parents. Or with your kids. In that sense, Flanagan’s series seeks to absolve its monstrous teenagers of any guilt or sin. Almost everything they do, however horrendous, can be blamed on their oblivious, cruel or zealously religious parents. And seeing what some of them are like, especially mom Margaret, you have to concede the point.

Over its eight episodes, Flanagan moves through the best-known moments of the Carrie liturgy (yes, the shower scene with the first period turns up in the early episodes), and everything that happens on the famous prom night is laid out at the outset, as already-known information relayed on TV. That lets the rest of the story be organized as a flashback, as if the entire series were a documentary-style, true-crime reconstruction. And in a way it is. How many stories are there about a girl with telekinetic powers who can set a huge hall on fire and wipe out a few hundred people on the spot? That’s a story that would merit its own true-crime series, wouldn’t it?

Flanagan also gives room to Carrie’s friends and enemies, with Siena Agudong and Alison Thornton playing Sue and Chris, the two girls our protagonist interacts with most and who will play a key role in her complicated school life. There’s also the villainous Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti, in the part John Travolta played in the 1976 film), the somewhat more presentable Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) and Matthew Lillard as the school principal. Among the supporting players, Tim Bagley stands out as Peter, the understanding school counselor.

Perhaps Flanagan’s Carrie isn’t really a horror story, and it doesn’t have the impact in that sense that De Palma’s film did. You could think of it more as a teen drama with supernatural elements, an agonizing portrait of how cruel and hard life can be for kids that age who suffer bullying at school and don’t know how to stop it. Carrie has her powers to help her get through the daily indignities school throws at her, but now even that isn’t enough to compete with a string of denigrating Instagram posts. Today, the best superpower belongs to whoever can disable cell phones and social media. Telekinesis is no longer enough.