Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie wants you to feel the heat of a phone camera. The 2013 remake opens in a girls’ locker room, where Carrie White gets her first period and the room turns on her. Chris Hargensen films the whole thing and uploads it to YouTube. That single update is the smartest move in the film, and it is nearly the only one that lands.
Trailer, via ScreamFactoryTV.
Chloë Grace Moretz and the Locker Room
The premise has not moved since Stephen King published the novel in 1974. Carrie is a shy outcast at Ewen High School in Maine, bullied by her classmates and sheltered by her mother, Margaret, a religious fanatic who calls menstruation a sin. Peirce, working from a screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, keeps that frame and dresses it in social media.
Moretz plays Carrie as wounded and watchful. Julianne Moore plays Margaret as a woman who believes her daughter’s power comes from the Devil. Both are working hard. Neither gets a scene that justifies the effort.
The film runs 101 minutes. It is the third adaptation of King’s novel and the fourth entry in the franchise, following the 1976 version. It premiered at the Arclight Hollywood in Los Angeles on October 7, 2013, and opened in the United States on October 18 through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Screen Gems.
Miss Desjardin Draws a Line
The middle stretch is the film’s best argument for existing. Judy Greer plays Miss Desjardin, the gym teacher who comforts Carrie and then punishes the girls who mocked her. She offers them a choice:
- Detention all week for their behavior
- Suspension from school, which bars them from prom
Chris is the only one who refuses and takes the suspension. That refusal is the engine of everything that follows, and it is the one place where the remake’s cruelty feels earned rather than staged.
Sue Snell, played by Gabriella Wilde, regrets her part and asks her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to take Carrie to the prom. Ansel Elgort plays Tommy. Carrie accepts, makes her own dress, and asks Margaret for permission to go.
The Prayer Closet and the Bleeding Crucifix
Peirce stages the domestic horror with real conviction. Margaret hits Carrie in the forehead with a Bible and locks her in a prayer closet. A crack splits the door. The crucifix on the wall begins to bleed. Carrie learns to harness her telekinesis, and on prom night she locks Margaret in the closet and walks out.
Then the prom happens, and the film stops thinking. Chris and her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, played by Alex Russell, set their plan in motion. The source material cuts off before the payoff, but the shape is unmistakable: the prank, the blood, the fire, the bodies. It is the scene every version of Carrie has to answer for, and this one answers it with volume instead of dread.
A Remake That Updates Without Deepening
The cast around the leads is thin. Portia Doubleday plays Chris as a flat mean girl with a phone. Zoë Belkin, Samantha Weinstein, Karissa Strain, Katie Strain and Demetrius Joyette fill out the student body without leaving a mark. The 1976 film came first and set the terms; this one has two excellent actors standing in a room that never quite catches fire.
The mixed reception was fair. Critics called the film unnecessary and pointed at the lack of originality and scares, while giving credit to the modern updates and the cast. Both halves of that verdict hold up. The YouTube upload is a genuine idea. The rest is a rerun.
What Carrie 2013 Gets Right
Here is the part worth weighing. Carrie is not a bad film. It is a redundant one, and redundancy is harder to forgive than failure, because failure at least means someone tried something. Peirce brings a real eye to the locker room and the prayer closet, the two rooms where the story lives. Moretz and Moore bring everything they have.
What the film never solves is why it exists. The 1976 adaptation already made this argument, and the novel made it better. Updating the bullying to a cell phone camera is a sharp observation about how cruelty now travels. It is not enough to carry 101 minutes.
Carrie is a film that knows its monster and forgets her. The telekinesis arrives, the prom burns, and the credits roll without a single image you could not have predicted from the poster. The tagline promised we would know her name. We already did.
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