Angela Watercutter praises Kimberly Peirce’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie for giving its female lead agency and self-awareness, unlike most horror films:
[T]he men in the audience … identify with her as she wreaks her revenge. Why? King has a theory: “One reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of.” In other words, [film professor Carol J.] Clover writes, a young man who’s been humiliated in a locker room can identify with a young woman pelted with tampons in a gym shower; King also suggests the “possibility that male viewers are quite prepared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen females in fear and pain.” The new version of Carrie states this almost flat-out, using Carrie’s eventual prom date, Tommy Ross, who relates her locker-room torture to his own experiences being bullied in grade school.
Devon Maloney identifies bullying as the film’s true monster:
This is the reason one remakes Carrie in 2013: to reframe unadulterated, schmaltzy horror into a more nuanced, realistic terror, the one that leaves you, on the one hand, oddly charged if you’ve ever felt been a victim, or scouring your mental Rolodex for the Carries of your own teenaged past if you were one of the kids dishing it out. This Carrie does what it ought to do: It proves that every generation needs its own cautionary tale about preying on the vulnerable until its circumstances are no longer relevant.
On the other hand, Eli Yudin and Carey O’Donnell see Carrie’s abusive, fanatical mother (played by Julianne Moore) as “the real horror of the movie”:
Our first glimpse of the twisted matriarch is in the very opening of the movie, as Moore gives birth to her daughter alone on her bed. She cries out to God, believing her labor is punishment for a sin she committed (premarital sex), and is convinced she is dying. When she first looks down at the infant between her legs, she views her as an immediate threat and raises a pair of scissors above the baby. However, Margaret spares her daughter after she looks into the baby’s eyes, and immediately cradles her, giving us a perfect summary of their relationship. Moore captures this love/hate seesaw wonderfully: she hates Carrie for being the physical reminder of what she views was her most dire disobedience to God, but realizes that Carrie provides her with the only remaining trace of humanity left in her, a mother’s unconditional love for her child.
Rather than [actor Piper] Laurie’s operatic Margaret [from Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation], Moore’s religious rants are hushed, coo-like, making for a more menacing contrast when she hits her daughter in the face with books, drags her into her “prayer closet”, and digs her fingernails and sewing tools into her own flesh. She’s a ghoul in every sense of the word, one that Peirce makes clear Carrie is so desperately trying not to become.
But Richard Corliss pans the move, saying “virtually ever scene in Peirce’s film is a pallid duplicate of De Palma’s”:
After Carrie’s transformation on prom night, when the event is called off due to high body count, she goes walking through the town’s streets like a Godzella unchained. De Palma showed [actor Sissy] Spacek dispatching [actors Nancy] Allen and [John] Travolta with a killer gaze that sent the bad kids’ car into an eight-turn rollover and a quick burst into flames. Peirce draws out the comeuppance, delaying Carrie’s climactic confrontation with her mother. It’s just unnecessary, like the rest of the movie.
The Dish 