Oct 13, 2026 9:30pm IST
‘Carrie’ Review: Mike Flanagan’s Franchise Ambitions Flatten an Otherwise Decent Adaptation of Unbridled Female Rage
With so many small-screen, stage, and big-screen adaptations of Stephen King’s debut novel, “Carrie” almost feels as old as time. A teenage outcast is bullied by her high school peers when she gets her first period and assumes she is dying. Mortified, she blames her widowed religious fanatic mother for not telling her about menstruation. The incident also unlocks her telekinesis, which she begins honing. When her dream prom is bloodied by another prank, Carrie (Summer H. Howell) lets loose and burns the entire town down. In Mike Flanagan’s hands, Carrie’s lore expands for the digital generation and leaps beyond the page. And yet, it also contracts by taking away what was rightfully hers—her rage.
For the Prime Video series, Flanagan gives “Carrie” a much-needed update for a crueler world. While previous adaptations have woven in the early Internet era into the bullying storyline, Flanagan taps into the “Finsta” (fake Instagram) trend by having Carrie’s bully, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), create a social media account that posts not just a video of Carrie freaking out but also of other students and faculty members at the school. Think of it like a digital edition of Regina George’s Burn Book from “Mean Girls”. Unlike the book, Flanagan’s Carrie’s “freak” quotient isn’t her appearance but the fact that she was homeschooled all her life, until her father’s death forced Carrie to go to school and her mother to get a job to retain custody.
Most of these updates are good, and coupled with the longer format, allow Flanagan to explore not just Carrie but also other characters, such as her bully Chris, her best friend Sue Snell, and even Carrie’s toxic relationship with her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). Other supporting characters, such as Carrie’s neighbor, who sneaks in books for her and drives her to her first party, and Carrie’s teacher, Miss Desjardin (Amber Midthunder), also get expanded storylines that weave effectively into the story's ethos.
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Flanagan’s mastery of the horror genre is well established with titles like “Gerald’s Game,” “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” and “Midnight Mass”. He has also written and directed the upcoming seventh installment in “The Exorcist” franchise, “The Exorcist: Martyrs.” His secret sauce has always been just how effectively he manifests themes of depression, religion, grief, greed, the corrupting nature of power and generational trauma and abuse into supernatural elements of horror.
“Carrie” marks Flanagan’s fourth adaptation of a Stephen King novel, and its cast is full of the filmmaker’s frequent collaborators—Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, Michael Trucco, Mark Hamill (in an unrecognizable cameo) and Flanagan’s wife, Kate Siegel—as well as genre favorites, like Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. Howell has paid her dues in several horror and slasher titles before taking on the prom queen role as Carietta White, a part she plays remarkably well.
However, what could’ve been the crowning glory of Howell’s performance, and really the entire series, is largely snatched away by Flanagan’s decision to dilute Carrie’s unbridled rage to expand the lore into a possible franchise. As Sue Snell reveals in the series’ opening episode, the destruction wasn’t just caused by Carrie. Other pieces on the chessboard had powers similar to hers. The series swaps the epistolary narrative framework of King’s novel—letters, newspaper clippings, reports that reveal what happened—for a documentary-interview style format, with Sue Snell and other survivors recounting what happened leading up to the Black Prom. Additionally, a voiceover begins each episode, tracing the history of women born with telekinetic powers—from the witches of Salem (Flanagan’s hometown) to more recent examples of women who have always been different and been driven mad by a world that doesn’t understand their powers.
The woman speaking is revealed to be Adelaide (Kate Siegel), a sort of cult leader for women with the TK (telekinesis) gene like Carrie. And while Adelaide’s presence as a “Magneto gathering the outcast mutants around him” vibe might be an exciting prospect for a future franchise, the existence of these “others” does flatten Carrie’s villain arc a little. For example, in a major change from the novel, Carrie isn’t the one who kills her mother. In fact, Carrie’s rage gets only a split-second on stage before Emaline, Carrie’s “imaginary friend” revealed to be very much corporeal, asks her if she can take the wheel. The fiery rampage of town-wide destruction and the brutal murders of Chris, Billy and other innocents then isn’t fully Carrie embracing her thirst for bloody revenge but Emaline channeling Carrie’s powers!
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Flanagan infuses Carrie’s building rage with so much juice throughout the series that watching her be remorseless and unhinged in the end would’ve been a terrifying payoff. In a year that has let flawed women revel in bloody murder—like Anne Hathaway’s Verity Crawford in “Verity” and Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames in “East of Eden”—Howell’s Carrie deserved to own her sins and be their sole proprietor. As if only to prove that in a crueler world like ours today, this is the intensity of rage that a young child could be harboring against their peers and the world. Considering the series let Chris go all out, Carrie deserved it too. Adelaide and Emaline needed only to be catalysts and not executors.
“Carrie” is still a somewhat decent outing in that it tries to tell an important story. And it does make you a little curious to see if a follow-up will arrive and what that might look like in the capable hands of Mike Flanagan. But Carrie deserved a full blowout.
All episodes are currently streaming on Prime Video.
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