'Carrie' Review: Amazon Gives Stephen King's First Book Modern Update You'll Never See Coming

By now, you're either on board with Mike Flanagan, or you got off the train about a hundred miles back. The prolific horror auteur has been working in the genre almost exclusively since 2011, and while every project has a slightly different flavor (from the gothic ghost story of The Haunting of Hill House to the religious horror in Midnight Mass ), you can usually recognize a Flanagan joint within a few minutes thanks to his verbose dialogue and fondness for working with the same group of actors.

Flanagan is also no stranger to adapting King's work, but until now, he's mostly stayed on the periphery, turning lesser-known stories like Gerald's Game and The Life of Chuck into well-reviewed movies. His most ambitious overlap was Doctor Sleep, based on King's sequel to The Shining.

With Flanagan's latest TV show, he's crossing a major threshold and adapting one of King's most famous and beloved books of all time. Carrie was the first novel King ever published, and while it's rarely ranked among his best, it's still considered a classic, thanks in part to Brian De Palma's dreamy film adaptation. So there's a lot of pressure on any new adaptation — and a lot of people asking why we even need a series-length retelling of an already perfect movie — but against all odds, Flanagan delivers the goods.

Carrie, which arrives as an eight-episode binge next week on Prime Video, manages to walk that microscopic line between faithful adaptation and unique reinvention. Flanagan updates the story for our terrible 2020s to explore the modern high school experience where online bullying and school shooting drills are the norm, all told through the naive perspective of Carrie's wide eyes. While the show drags at times on its way to the climactic ending we all know is coming, it's still a gripping story that Flanagan fans (and even some of his haters) will gleefully devour.

Carrie starts at the end. After the deadly prom incident where Carrie unleashed her powers on an innocent crowd, the survivors are interviewed in an attempt to understand what happened. It's a clever framing device that quickly falls away as the story clicks into gear.

Weeks earlier, we meet Carrie's father as he heads to work at a construction site while listening to a political podcast that sounds suspiciously like Tucker Carlson. Moments later, he dies in a tragic workplace accident. The police visit his home to deliver the awful news and find something bizarre: a religious shut-in named Margaret White (Flanagan go-to villain, Samantha Sloyan) and her teenage daughter Carietta (Summer H. Howell). Carrie's life changes in an instant. The authorities explain that Margaret needs to get a job and start sending her child to the local high school, or Carrie will be taken away from her.

This forces both mother and daughter to enter the real world. It doesn't go well. Carrie is immediately bullied by mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), while Margaret is stuck scrubbing toilets at a local supermarket. When Carrie gets her first period after gym class and the girls pelt her with tampons, Chris creates an anonymous Instagram account called Carrie Red and starts terrorizing the entire school with made-up rumors. The principal (Matthew Lillard) does nothing, so Margaret seizes the opportunity to lead an online crusade against cyberbullying that threatens to boil over into violent vigilantism. Meanwhile, Carrie's latent telekinetic powers begin to express themselves in violent ways as the pressure continues to build.

As Carrie hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, Flanagan places various obstacles along the way to send the story off its trajectory. Carrie makes a goth friend who isn't what she seems. Chris gets a more complicated story that almost makes you sympathize with her. The school staff suffer just as much from Instagram bullying as the students. Everyone in Carrie is having a terrible time, but it's hard to look away. We know the story's true horror will eventually emerge from Carrie's awful psychic outburst, but watching the entire town squirm under the pressure of anonymous social media accusations is even more agonizing.

Flanagan gives his entire cast interesting things to do and say, but Sloyan truly rises to the challenge of reinventing Margaret White. If you close your eyes, you can probably picture Piper Laurie as Carrie's vindictive, fanatically religious mother in the De Palma movie, but Sloyan and Flanagan take the character in a remarkably different direction. This version of Maragaret is complex and compassionate. She's a loving mother with some bad tendencies that mostly derive from her own fear of the world. We watch her launch a social media account to combat the one terrorizing her daughter, only to get sucked in by the allure of a parasocial relationships and the power that comes with it. Sloyan's Margaret isn't the villain of the story, but she's not the hero either. She's a deeply flawed woman trying to do what's right who fails by almost every metric possible.

While the rest of the adult cast, which includes Flanagan standbys like Rahul Kohli along with newcomers like Amber Midthunder (Prey), makes a feast of his script, the child cast sometimes struggles to keep up. A lot of the show is focused on high school kids talking about dating, parties, college, and social media. (Chris' entire villain arc comes down to the fact that she can't go to her college of choice, though it's more nuanced than it sounds.) It's not all golden era television, but the fact that most of it is pretty damn entertaining says a lot both about the strength of the story and the talent of those 20-something actors pretending to be teens.

Flanagan's biggest risk (and the one that will almost undeniably get people talking) is the way he messes with his source material. Without getting into spoilers, I'll just say that Carrie draws some surprising connections to King's bigger, connected universe in ways the book and De Palma's universe never did. To be fair, Carrie was King's first novel and there was nothing to connect it to at the time. If he'd written the story a few decades later, he almost definitely would have found a reason to set at least part of it in Castle Rock, Maine or teased a connection to private investigator Holly Gibney. Flanagan takes the bait, and whether he succeeds feels inconclusive.

Most of this lore-tweaking is saved for the very end and used as setup for future seasons of Carrie. (Flanagan has said he has a three-season plan.) The show's cliffhanger ending, which happens after the famous prom scene, is clearly setting up a bigger story that may or may not happen, likely depending on what Amazon's streaming algorithm decides. But either way, the eight episodes that exist right now are a daring and complete retelling of the iconic story of Carrie White.