Carrie movie review & film summary (2013)

Perhaps because this "Carrie" is helmed by one of the only prominent female directors in Hollywood, Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry"), it appreciates Carrie and her mother and the heroine's various female adversaries as women, and portrays their brand of cruelty as specifically female. For example, where the girls in the 1976 "Carrie" tormented the menstruating heroine in the shower in a wolf-pack manner, as teenaged boys might attack another teenage boy, the shower attack in this film is a joke that originates in embarrassment and nausea, then snowballs. (Peirce doesn't show nudity; this time it's all about the girls' emotions.) 

Peirce and screenwriters Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa give the whole film this kind of heartfelt, inside-out re-imagining. Class differences play a part in Carrie's mistreatment; a few early shots establish that Carrie and Margaret live far from the obviously privileged high school, in a modest neighborhood. And as the tale nears its inevitable climax, the tone becomes more despairing. Nothing can stop what's coming.

It's on this last point, though, that "Carrie" falters most conspicuously—and ironically, its failure is a product of its decision to depart from the novel and the first film, but without going far enough. Peirce's version sometimes makes Chris seem a bit of a victim, too, by implying that she was spoiled rotten by her yuppie dad—played by a perfectly cast Hart Bochner, a.k.a. Ellis from "Die Hard." This is a good impulse, but the movie doesn't properly follow through on it. The script has Chris be exaggeratedly "evil" when it serves the plot, but life-sized elsewhere. This version strands the supporting characters between realism and archetype, an awkward spot. 

Still, there's a lot to like in this remake. It's sincerely interested in exploring the pain that its characters suffer and inflict. And when Carrie unleashes the full brunt of her powers, it's a magnificent and appalling spectacle—the teenage sci-fi rampage that the "X-Men" films never dared show us.

Not for nothing does Carrie check out library books on magic as well as paranormal power: when she becomes a gore-drenched avenging angel, her gestures become more ritualized, almost dancer-like—as if she's not just committing gruesome murders, but in some sense "presenting" them, as a performer might. The movie links Carrie's burgeoning power to creativity, watching her develop her gifts until, at the end, she is assured enough to preside over a combination Grand Guignol play and art exhibit. The prom is a masterpiece of mixed-media slaughter, "Hellraiser" by way of Columbine. Each killing is a discrete work employing different media and techniques: death by psychic assault, by trampling, by electrocution, by fire, by face-through-glass. As Walter Chaw writes, "Peirce's Carrie does something DePalma's doesn't do nearly so well: it describes Carrie's headspace, so that her telekinesis becomes expressionistic."