Carrie (***)

Directed by: Kimberley Pierce

Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Ansel Elgort, Portia Doubleday, Judy Greer, Alex Russell

Seen: January 11^th 2014

*** Out of ****

I was initially not going to go see Carrie, as I’m not really that much of a fan of horror movies. A good friend saw it though, and told me that he was affected by the movie in an unexpected way, which prompted me to see Carrie. I have little knowledge of the earlier movies, so my review is not on whether this one is better than that one; it’s only based on this movie. The one thing that to me stands out in Carrie is that in our lives we make the monsters that have the potential to destroy us and cause considerable collateral damage.

Carrie (Moretz) is a shy and pale high school girl, mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Her mother Margaret (Moore) is shown at the beginning of the movie to have almost killed Carrie at birth, changing her mind at the last moment. At home Carrie and her mother has an extremely tenuous relationship, Margaret being extremely controlling with extremist and conservative views. She forces Carrie into submission at every possible opportunity, sometimes violently so, even going so far as to lock Carrie up under the stairs to pray for her sins.

Carrie’s mother, completely against anything sexual, has out of choice never taught Carrie about the female reproductive system and when she experiences her first period after gym class in the shower, she is terrified, thinking she is dying. The other girls, whipped up by Chris Hargenson (Doubleday), mock Carrie terribly and Chris records it on her phone and loads it to the web. Chris’ friend Sue Snell (Wilde) doesn’t participate in the bullying, but the guilt starts eating her up after Chris is suspended from school and banned from prom when gym teacher Miss Desjardin (Greer) and the school principal act decisively. Carrie starts realising that she has telekinetic powers, and she researches the abilities while exercising them. Sue asks her boyfriend Tommy Ross (Elgort) to take Carrie to prom instead of her, to simply treat her, to be nice, but Chris and her boyfriend Billy Nolan (Russell) have other plans; a horrible and extremely juvenile revenge on Carrie, which ends up igniting something in Carrie that will make everyone involved forever regret their actions as prom night explodes in a cascade of blood.

Carrie is an effective movie as both supernatural horror and cautionary tale. While the supernatural angle is obviously not within our conscious belief of reality, it is merely an extension of what some people vicariously wish for daily – an answer from the bullied, a violent retort to unwanted and unnecessary negative attention and aggression. Visually the movie is well produced, and the actors deliver believable characters, with the only exception an overly evil Chris Hargenson as delivered by Portia Doubleday, she truly gets annoying (which was the intention, but it passes that point and just keeps going…). The movie is effective in that the viewer feels sympathy for the bullied, for the one who eventually acts out with the most violence, while also making you think, if only for a moment, about how you treat others, and what the possible repercussions of that may be in future.