Carrie: Review
Cast: Summer H Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette, Josie Totah, Heather Graham, Arthur Conti, Thalia Dudek, Amber Midthunder, and Matthew Lillard
The message in the 2026 retelling of Stephen King's Carrie is nothing new.
Mike Flanagan, who created The Haunting of Hill House among others, knows how to spin a spooky tale and build suspense. And while it's no spoiler to say that the 2026 version of Carrie deals with mean girls, meme accounts and the perils of social media on the innocent and the easily corruptible, the central message of the dangers of toxic behaviour is in itself, not an entirely new one to extol.
But it is however a worthy one to repeat time and time again.
In this latest version, Summer H Howell impresses as Carrie White, the locked-at-home-teenager who suddenly after the death of her father finds herself the centre of attention as she attends the local high school, Ewen High School.
As the series begins, it starts with a series of 911 calls and montages of the school burning, people dead and carnage expanding much wider than just the prom that everyone knows. But as a clutch of youngsters from the scene are interrogated by the police, one message becomes clear as a mantra for the new telling of Carrie - it's also about the other people at the prom.
So to that effect, Flanagan concocts a story of a naive, innocent and sweet Carrie being inducted into the world she's never experienced. From the horror of the first-ever period to the discovery of betrayal, Howell crafts a believable character whose sweetness is juxtapositioned with the growing bitterness of schoolmate Chris (Thornton) whose seemingly perfect world is crumbling with her college dream fading, her parents splitting and her options running out.
While it has to be said that eight episodes feels a little too long for this series, complete with its structure of prefacing each episode with an example of how women have been beaten down ("People love to see women fall" is one phrase uttered in one pre-credits opener), the series remains eminently watchable as it espouses some familiar tropes of high school life for the bullies, the neglected and those just trying to fit in.
But there's a gentleness here that undercuts some of the nastier darker edges which would have distinctly benefited the show and gifted it an undeniable edge to help it stand out.
Carrie may be alien to the world around her and Flanagan's script uses that starting point as a prelude to the horrors of school life in the 2020s. From metal detectors at the gate to peering faces, to hunched teens slouching over phones, it's no wonder one teacher tells another that "these aren't your kids, they'll break your heart" at one point before some of the savagery and cruelness comes to the fore.
With some impressive reveals and shocks towards the end of the run, patience is rewarded for wading through some of the well-realised but very familiar set-up episodes.
Thankfully though, with Howell's performance leading this series, the 2026 version of Carrie is solidly impressive, even if it's never quite outstanding enough to feel as fresh as it could. Perhaps it's a relief that all eight episodes are released at once, because it makes a watch worth taking on - even if you know the basics of the story from Sissy Spacek's breathtaking interpretation.
Carrie is streaming on Prime Video from October 7. All eight episodes of the series were watched for the purposes of this review.
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