It has it's ups and downs, but it's a breath of fresh air for horror

Rating: 4/10 (20 November 2019)

Carrie is... interesting. The intro is bad, the story is excellent, the climax is okay, and the ending is terrible. The lows and highs are incredibly unbalanced, making a barely average film overall. The most notable impact the movie has is that it's not a horror movie, but rather the first movie that's about horrific things from the "monster's" point of view. It's just as easy to care about the monster as it is for her victims, which is a notable accomplishment.
Beginning at the intro, several things right off the bat show poor directing and editing decisions. The locker room nude scenes are disturbingly gratuitous, especially since all of the girls are supposedly high school age and at least one is pre-pubescent. The sound is mixed horribly. Loud and high pitched noises have horrendous audio distortion, so shouts are incomprehensible and screams sound more digital than human. Granted, I'm not sure if the audio is equally bad from every playing source (I watched it on Amazon Prime on a device that handles loud and high-pitched noises well). The "music" is terrible, randomly inserting 2-second horror sound clips out of nowhere at absurd times. Lastly, Laurie (the mother) is an awful actress. Carrie has a Southern accent, but her mom keeps switching between American, English, and Scottish dialects, often switching mid-sentence.
With the intro out of the way, the story quickly sucked me in. Spacek (Carrie) acts extremely well. It's easy to connect with her plight, and her emotional moments are very convincing. Her struggles and her newfound place in the world carry the movie effortlessly to the climax.
*Potential spoilers below*
The climax is decent. The split scene was an interesting choice that served well to portray a sense of chaos, and it also helped cover up the fact that things were happening slowly or with poor special effects on either single screen. The brief pause was good to signal the change of pace, and continuing climax at home was exciting. Laurie (the mom) finally starts to occasionally slip into a Southern accent, but now she's switching between 4 dialects instead of 3.
Unfortunately the film decides to conclude on the worst of terms with a series of illogical moments. I understand the symbolism of the mom's position, but it's impossible for her to be suspended that way, and it's far too obvious that she's just standing and holding herself. Lying on the floor or on something at an angle would have had the same symbolic effect without breaking the immersion. The entire thing with the house is just stupid. I'm hoping it didn't end up like the dream sequence and that Carrie actually pulled it down, but it didn't seem like it was intentionally done by Carrie if it was her fault. The doctor is an idiot for thinking a high school senior is too young to remember a traumatic event. The music during the conclusion also goes back to the absurdly placed horror sounds.