The basic story of Carrie is already a labored, two-note plot. Part one: the peculiar teenage girl with the overbearing, religiously paranoid mother is bullied at school. Part two: a nasty prank on the girl, who has discovered her own telekinetic powers, sends her into a hellish rage, wreaking havoc on her school. Sticking to that essential dynamic already makes it easy to screw-up. The success of the story is all about the tone and the texture of the piece, and the way it can pick up on and electrify its adolescent setting. In his original 1976, Brian de Palma succeeded, in part, at making a campy, satisfying horror film that rode hard on its aligning of supernatural dread with the every day horror of high school. In the new film based on Stephen King’s novel, we don’t get close to the same sense of vindictive satisfaction.
One of the biggest things the new movie gets wrong is its most important relationship, between Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz), the bullied teenage girl who discovers she has special, telekinetic powers, and her mother, Margaret White (Julianne Moore), an overbearing, fanatically religious tyrant. From the moment we meet momma White, writhing on a bed, covered in blood, screaming prayers to Jesus, Moore’s performance is a blabbering mess. The actress has been wonderful of late in very different motherly roles in Don Jon and What Maisie Knew, but here she reduces any sense of Gothic dread to a hollow holler. And when that first scene, in which she gives birth to a baby and nearly bludgeons it with a pair of scissors, fails to raise a single hair on the back of the neck, we know we’re in for a long trudge.
Moretz as Carrie is simply miscast. She’s too-cute and puckish, and she has none of the vacant-gaze creep-out appeal that Sissy Spacek brought to the role. When she begins to push up against her mother’s restraints, there’s no real energy or bite to the sense of injustice – or indication that the recoiled reaction might become super-charged. Instead, Moretz’s Carrie is a lovable victim hero, who settles into a performance that feels more apt for a one-and-done role on a Beverly Hills 90210 episode about bullying.
Beyond these two, there’s plenty more Carrie gets wrong. There’s no texture to the high school setting, and no real grit to the Seventeen magazine pinups that grace the halls. When one uses a mallet to bludgeon a pig, or another takes crude knife to the pig’s throat, the disconnect between the action and the capacity of these after-school special characters is so strong the scene just seems silly. And when it comes time for that anticipated final showdown, as with so many imagination-less horror films these days, the emphasis becomes framing staggering images and violent detail. Particularly memorable is the moment when a girl’s face smashes through a windshield where it sticks in the spider-cracked glass like it is caught in a web. These moments are just horror shtick dabbled onto the surface of a film that never really works in the first place: hard, graphic images that are the stand-ins for any other emotional content.
