Carrie returns to the big screen
“You will know her name,” scream the posters for the new big- screen version of Carrie, as if anyone could forget it after seeing Brian De Palma’s brilliant 1976 movie or reading the original Stephen King novel.
Aimed at captivating a new generation of viewers unfamiliar with the tale of a cruelly unloved high- schooler who unleashes telekinetic revenge on her classmates, director Kimberly Peirce’s intermittently effective third feature eschews De Palma’s diabolical wit and voluptuous style in favour of a sombre, straightfaced retelling, steeped in a now- familiar horror- movie idiom of sharp objects, shuddering sound effects and dark rivulets of blood.
While it can’t hope to match the galvanising impact of its predecessor, Peirce’s film works for a considerable stretch as a derivative but impressively coherent vision. Chief among the film’s selling points are an intensely committed Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, enacting a subtler, more psychologically insidious take on the mother- daughter relationship immortalised by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie.
That twisted character dynamic looms over the proceedings from the opening childbirth scene, which quickly familiarises the viewer with the film’s menstrual colour scheme and establishes Margaret White ( Moore) as a dangerous religious fanatic, who receives her infant daughter as divine punishment for her sexual sins.
Years later, the girl has grown up to be the painfully shy and awkward Carrie ( Moretz), whose crucible of suffering onscreen begins and ends with an outpouring of blood.
Carrie’s locker- room humiliation at the hands of her female classmates is captured on video and quickly goes viral, setting off a chain of events that will ultimately bring about the story’s fiery prom- night climax.
Peirce offers a fresh, intelligent spin on certain key aspects of a largely familiar tale.
Rather than trying to compete with Piper Laurie’s fire- and- brimstone bellow, Moore acts with a hushed, feverish intensity. For her part, Moretz can scarcely be blamed for falling short of one of the most iconic performances in horror cinema; no other actress could capture that hauntingly lost quality Spacek brought to the role. Still, Moretz is canny and sympathetic enough that she eventually slips under Carrie’s skin. —