Carrie (2013) | Film Review

(Originally published on Letterboxd on Jan 18, 2014) - Carrie, as a horror film, has officially been made four times. One of those four is technically considered a sequel, but other than the main character being named Rachel and not Carrie, everything else is pretty much identical, so to call it anything other than a remake would be a bold-faced lie. It's not hard to see why Hollywood would go to the Carrie well so often, either; it's got a great premise: An unpopular teenage girl is tormented by her classmates, and upon learning she has telekinetic superpowers, uses them to seek revenge. And in Brian De Palma's original 1976 version, it was magnificent!

In every other version since… not so much.

Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Carrie White, a trouble teen born to an evangelical lunatic, Margaret (Julianne Moore). Margaret home schooled Carrie for years, until the state forced Carrie into the public school system. Sheltered from the outside world, and even herself, all Margaret ever taught Carrie was that other people are bad, God is good, and the closet is the best place to pray. So when Carrie gets her period for the first time in the girls locker room, she's naturally horrified. Looking for help, she finds her fellow classmates who are quick to mock and videotape her anguish, while pelting her with tampons. This is more than just an opening scene: it's THE SCENE that pits Carrie against her bullies, and instills a desire for revenge in the audience that's to be carried out later in the film. 

It's hard not to judge this version of Carrie against its predecessor—and by that I mean the original Sissy Spacek version, forget those other pieces of shit—but as a viewer, having knowledge of it, you sort of have to. Especially when this version is made almost beat-for-beat. There's nothing new brought to the table, so all we have to go on is what we've seen before and if this version does it better… and it doesn't.

Everything about this remake is inferior to the original. Sissy Spacek was awkward in a naive way. She played Carrie as someone who feared her mother, and wanted desperately to have a life outside of the closet she'd been forced to pray in her entire life. There was a joy and a sense of wonder in her portrayal that made you root for her, and against her bullies. And when she finally snaps in the end, you wish she could control herself so she could move on and learn to live a normal life, but deep down you're sort of happy to see her exact revenge—until she starts killing innocent people. Chloe's portrayal is very different. She plays Carrie nerdy and nervous. She's awkward around people in a fidgety way, with a perma-sneer plastered on her face that makes her seem more angst-ridden than naive. It's hard to root for this Carrie, because this Carrie sort of feels like she deserves it. Of course, nobody deserves to be bullied the way Chloe's Carrie is, but her version of the character certainly doesn't illicit any real sympathy.

I have similar issues with Julianne Moore's portrayal of Margaret White. In the original, Piper Laurie played Margaret with a much more sinister undertone. Sure, she was a crazy zealot, but she was also mean. We were made to hate her, so that when Carrie frees herself through her telekinetic superpowers, we sort of approve. Julianne's Margaret isn't really mean at all—she's just misunderstood. She's a more sympathetic mom who, while still totally bat-shit crazy, seems to be the only crazy mixed up person, in this crazy mixed up movie, that has any notion that there is more going on with her daughter than even her daughter realizes. 

While it's easy to lay the blame for bad performances on the performers, Chloe and Julianne didn't do a bad job—it just wasn't the right job for this material. So the fault has to lay at the feet of the director, Kimberly Peirce. While a solid director in her own right (Stop-Loss, Boys Don't Cry), her lack of understanding of the horror genre really shows here. Carrie is visually bland, and the characters are treated in a way that keeps them at a distance, which is a death knell for any film, but especially a dramatic horror piece like this. Combine that with a dumbed-down/updated script provided by Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa (Glee, Big Love), and you've got a piece that works too hard to make the Whites sympathetic, the bullies monstrous in very monstrous way, and completely devoid of any real understanding of why we should even care about anything happening on screen in the first place.

Carrie fails on every level both as a horror film, and as a film in general. Bad direction, writing, schlocky 3D effects, and misguided performances help to take a horror classic and turn it into an overly slick looking mess that will likely be forgotten as quickly as the last remake and sequel were. Considering how loaded this thing was with talent from top to bottom, it's a real shame. Next time someone wants to reboot this thing—and there will be a next time—hopefully the powers that be have enough sense to grab a few tampons and start pelting said person while shouting, "Plug it up! Plug it up!" because they'd totally deserve it.