Carrie

Mike Flanagan's eight-episode take on Stephen King's first novel, streaming on Prime Video. Summer H. Howell plays Carrie White. Samantha Sloyan is her mother Margaret, Siena Agudong is Sue Snell, Alison Thornton is Chris Hargensen, Joel Oulette is Tommy Ross, Josie Totah is Tina, and Matthew Lillard shows up as Principal Grayle. The usual Flanagan bench, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco, Crystal Balint, fills in the adults. The early episodes do what you'd expect: a lonely girl in a house ruled by a mother's religion, a locker-room incident that lands her on the wrong side of a very specific high school, and the slow dawning that something is different about her.

Howell is the whole argument. She doesn't do a Sissy Spacek impression and she doesn't do the 2013 version either; she plays Carrie smaller, more watchful, more like a kid who's been studying how people breathe because she's never been allowed to. Sloyan is the other reason to show up. She already proved in Midnight Mass that she can play a true believer without flattening her into a cartoon, and Margaret White is that performance with the dial turned. Flanagan's directing instincts, long takes, patient blocking, actors allowed to finish a thought, suit a story that's always been about dread building in a quiet room. Lillard, used sparingly, is weirdly moving as the one adult who's noticing.

Eight hours is a lot of hours for a novel this slim, and you feel it. Subplots get real estate they don't entirely earn, and anyone who comes in wanting the lean, nasty 1976 film is going to spend the first two episodes checking their watch. The Hollywood Reporter's complaint, that it's less frightening than it should be, isn't wrong. This is a character study with horror furniture, not a horror show with character work. The high school material leans more drama than nightmare, and a couple of the teen performances can't quite keep pace with Howell and Sloyan when they share a scene.

If you liked The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, you already know what you're signing up for: grief, religion, long conversations in dim rooms, a monster who's also a daughter. If your Carrie is De Palma's split-screen, you'll be bored by hour three. Fans of Yellowjackets' slow-rot teen cruelty and Sharp Objects' Southern-Gothic hush will settle in fine. Anyone treating this as a slasher quits before the second episode ends.

Worth It, with an asterisk. Flanagan's bet is that King's book is a tragedy that happens to end in horror, not horror that happens to involve a sad girl, and the eight-episode length is him making room for that tragedy. It mostly works because Howell and Sloyan are doing serious acting and because the direction trusts silence. The show has opinions, about zealotry, about how adults fail kids, about cruelty as a group sport, and it earns them through performance and scene-building instead of monologues aimed at the camera. It's slow, it's not as scary as it should be, and the back half of the ensemble can't always keep up. But a patient, well-acted King adaptation that respects the source is rarer than it should be, and this one clears the bar.