In Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, Samantha Sloyan plays Margaret White as a woman who has already decided the world is at war with her, and she’s wrong about almost everything, except the school’s active-shooter drill. Mental illness is not real, only a weakness of spirit. Doctors are demonic. They invent diagnoses, poison the food, poison the water. Parents are an army, and God is on their side. When Carrie says something is wrong with her, Margaret screams that she does not need a doctor. She needs to shut up and listen to her mother. None of that is insight. It is a closed house with a scripture and a dead husband’s explanations for why nothing outside can be trusted.
Then the school runs an active-shooter drill on Carrie’s first day, and the rant gets uncomfortable. Carrie has never heard of the thing the other kids treat as a calendar item. She thinks the gun is real. The next morning Margaret is in Principal Grayle’s office, furious that the school put her daughter through a rehearsal for being shot, warning that parents will rain down like God’s wrath, asking to be told next time so she can take Carrie home. The conspiracy is still the conspiracy. The objection is not crazy. Teaching children to hide from a gunman and calling it normal is a rotten fact.
Flanagan has said he kept agreeing with Margaret’s fear even when he rejected what she did with it.
That is the trick. The same split runs through the rest of her. She is right that the phones are a new instrument of cruelty, and wrong that the cure is a closet. She is right that a sheltered girl will be eaten alive in that building, and wrong that the eating is a plot by academics. She loves Carrie. The love is the problem. Every true observation gets drafted into the war, and the war only has one loyal interpreter left in the house.
By the time she is done, the good point is gone and the order remains: do not listen to the doctor, the principal, or your own body. Listen to your mother.
