From CCFF ’26 – Carolina Caroline

Carolina Caroline [2025]

Film

A young woman, desperate to leave her small town, runs away with a charming con man, embarking on a crime and passion-filled journey through the Southeast to find her estranged mother.

Take Bonnie and Clyde, mix it with one part Badlands and another part True Romance – then add a splash of Natural Born Killers, a dash of Thelma & Louise, and top it off with a pinch of Hell or High Water and garnish with some Wild at Heart for good measure. Iff those are the ingredients the recipe is calling for, you're in for some high-quality imbibement. The concoction we ended up with in this case isCarolina Caroline, a new romantic crime film positions itself like a contemporary country song from Jason Isbell – a fresh take on an old standard. This update to the lovers-on-the-run road movie from director Adam Carter Rehmeier has a familiar framework and shares a similar aesthetic with those aforementioned films (which is admittedly far from an exhaustive list of the sub-genre at large). But while Caroline Caroline aims high and is certainly intended to be in conversation with those iconic movies, its end result is more of a little more watered down compared to its creative forebears, like two fingers of Jim Beam poured over too much ice.

Spoilers aplenty

The titular Caroline (Samara Weaving, who is having herself a year) is a gas station attendant in rural Texas (which almost immediately tested the outer limits of plausibility but that's fine). Enter in the rugged con-man, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), who tries to pull off a short change scam on her employer (which I would absolutely have fallen for if I was the store clerk), before he's sniffed out by the astute but wide-eyed Caroline. The characterization here is relatively plain and familiar but still honest and effective – she's smarter than he first assumes, and she's quick to realize that he might not be quite as smart as he thinks he is. But also, she's stuck in the middle of nowhere going nowhere and wanting to get out, and he's out in the world moving place-to-place, living off nothing but free to go anywhere. Some of the film's best stuff is in the first hour – these foundational character beats could easily have been over-played, but I think the table here is set nicely.

Like any great romantic crime film, how Bonnie meets Clyde, and how they are drawn into one another's lives is perhaps the most important thing story-wise to get right. In this film, Caroline and Oliver's meet-cute is effective and immediately establishes a nearly flammable heat between them, thanks to the genuine chemistry between Weaving and Gallner. The actors' ability to lock into their characters and build out an organic connection almost immediately is the film's strongest feature. So what happens next when you bring together two extremely hot people with little-to-no prospects and who will eventually get up to no good together? Uh, no duh, they bang it out and fall in love! And their love goes beyond physical attraction – it becomes an open-road adventure, a possible means to end, or maybe even just a way to get by. It takes very little time for Oliver to begin coaching Caroline how to sustain off small-stakes scamming, which slowly grows into more procedural, higher-stakes bank robbing. Before long, Caroline and Oliver have money to spare but also their identities to protect – they're in love, on the run, but always one misstep away from blowing their cover and losing it all, and each other. Let me just say here, if you're looking for simple pleasures at the movies, you could do much, much worse than watching this outrageously attractive couple fall in love and hit the open road together.

The second half of the film was less of a success for me. The world creeps back in with each job and their decision making begins to strain – as does the film's character motivations and plotting mechanics. After a mishap where their identities are nearly exposed if not for an aggressive threat from Oliver, the couple make their way to South Carolina as a temporary side quest to track down Caroline's completely out-of-the-picture mother, Deborah (Kyra Sedgwick). After an uncomfortable few minutes, Deborah realizes its her daughter and rejects her, which leads a devastated Caroline to ramp up their bank-robbing so the she and Oliver can leave the country for good. As expected, the walls begin to close and as things gradually go off the rails, and their chances at a future together are all but extinguished.

Without dissecting each story beat, I found my interest in the story and my investment in these characters waning as the chips stacked higher and higher. This had less to do with any of the performances and perhaps more to do with the somewhat generic fallout from the "been-there-done-that"-ness of the film's finale. And while the performances mostly kept the threads of the story from ever pulling too far apart (especially the Weaving and Gallner's chemistry), I found a lot of what was happening around them to be a little bleh. Even in her one-scene cameo, I thought Sedgwich was ultra-committed but maybe in a slightly different movie, which was a little more distracting than enlightening. All that is to say, the film's resolution worked fine enough, but also felt like a missed opportunity to do something fresh or unexpected. What exactly that is, I wouldn't pretend to know; but the story structure and plot machinations of the film's third act sucked out of much of the energy that seemed to flow with ease through the film's first act. Maybe the takeaway here is that it's hard to carve a new path without betraying or leaving your audience behind. But maybe that would've been the more interesting course to chart.

Aside from Snack Shack (a movie that I came to late but enjoyed) , I don't have much experience with Rehmeier as a filmmaker. Despite any of my critiques, I think the movie works on the whole. Maybe the screenplay he's working with is a little stiff and limited much of the tonal wiggle room he and his performers had to explore. In terms of the craft, the movie has a look and feel that felt very competently made, a good signal for more to come from Rehmeier. The thing that has stuck with me most these past few weeks is the use of music and the film's effective needle drops employed. Sometimes obvious is good, and there's no faster way to get your audience to understand what the characters are going through and what the story is trying to say than a note-perfect needle drop. There's Jason Isbell's loving but heartbreaking "Cover Me Up," Emmylou Harris' cover of Springsteen's "My Father's House," and Chris Stapleton's hit-the-road "Parachute," and Steve Earle's "Someday," to name just a few. Many of the songs used do a good job moving the narrative along; even though some of them are nearly too on-the-nose, they work collectively and help give the movie a depth and soul it desperately needs.

Carolina Caroline is a movie where I like the parts from the sum of the parts. Thinking about it more, what might've been missing from the film was a dash more skosh more humor; one of the preeminent features of those iconic films is a kind of wicked, rye sense of humor that comes from a kind of cognitive disonance that is the result of descending into a life of criminality. While I still liked what the film was going for tonally, the melodrama was just a bit stiff and the buzz was a bit flat for my liking. Just my two cents, but if you're planning on sipping really good whiskey, it's sometimes best to leave the ice in the freezer. Does that analogy even make sense in this context? You be the judge.

Carolina Caroline was released in the United States on Friday, June 5, 2026, by Magnolia Pictures.