Brian De Palma
Carrie

Carrie is a film by Brian De Palma, in which the Italian-American director brings to life the debut novel of a young writer with a bright future, Stephen King. From it, screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen will derive a fairly linear screenplay: Carrie is, in fact, the first film shot by De Palma in which he is not also the screenwriter.

The film is set in a nameless American city of the seventies: wooden houses with green lawns in front; wide streets of residential neighborhoods traveled by Chevrolet, Beetles, and Ford Mustangs; high school with its prom.

Here, more than elsewhere, those who conform are inside, the eccentrics are outside.

Carrie is very eccentric. At school, her oddities are a cause of exclusion and the terrible cruelty of her peers who make her their scapegoat. The figures of authority, deep down, understand her: Carrie is a big nuisance, she doesn't behave like her classmates, she doesn't dress as she should, she ignores the "monthly cycle" and any other aspect of her body.

School for Carrie seems to be what ten years later will be for Leonard Lawrence the marine school. Both are inadequate and targeted, but both have powers: Leonard has exceptional aim, Carrie has telekinetic powers.

Their story is that of a failed attempt at inclusion and redemption.

However, the plot of the two films is different. The initial situation, as we have seen, is nightmarish, and, to worsen it and, in a sense, causing it all, there is a family situation of first subjugation, then conflict: Carrie lives with her only mother, a fundamentalist puritan with psychological troubles, who sees perpetual penance as the only way to salvation from sin, therefore, she demands from Carrie total modesty, affliction, and repentance.

Carrie does not want this life, so, from this situation, she begins a path to improve her condition, which, if Carrie were Cinderella, would end with the ball and the prince’s love.

But Carrie is a sad story and a horror tale. While the sky is clearing and luck is finally smiling upon her, two classmates are plotting something behind her back, but in front of the viewers. Sue, the good girl, makes an ambiguous gesture of atonement for the previous bullying and secretly offers her companion to Carrie for the prom; Chris, the bad girl, is preparing her revenge after being excluded from the prom due to her behavior.

The viewer knows that something big will happen during the prom. They know the secret plans of Sue and Chris, of which the director shows the climax in a synchronized way, through the duplication of the screen. They know Carrie's powers. The three girls, on the other hand, are unaware of each other's plans and powers. All will be surprised by how it will end.

The director lets the viewer simmer in the anticipation of the impending tragedy: today as in 1976, the wait will keep them clinging to the screen to know how the tension will unravel; this is because, even if some themes may seem dated, the structure, the dialogues, the film's soundtrack (whose theme underscores the sad and dreamy character of the story), and De Palma's style are still current or effective.

From the initial long shot where the camera swoops down from above onto a school class to observe the gaze, of the very big blue eyes, and the harmless, sad, and melancholic smile of the protagonist; passing through the voyeuristic slow motion in the female lockers; arriving at the terrible dolly shot that escorts a terrified and bloodied Carrie back into the shower: the film is immediately revealed as a laboratory and an exercise of brilliant directorial style by the young De Palma.

For this and more, Carrie is undoubtedly, for those who do not know it, a gap to fill; for everyone else, a film to rewatch, because you do not watch a good film, a good film can only be rewatched.