Movie Review: Carolina Caroline (CCFF 2026)

Carolina Caroline is a Southern-soaked Bonnie and Clyde road trip movie about love, passion, crime, and greed. Samara Weaving stars as the titular Caroline, a seemingly simple young woman living on the outskirts of Texas with her father (John Gries). While she’s working a shift at the local gas station, Oliver (Kyle Gallner) enters and pulls off a small change con on the cashier. Caroline notices and is intrigued by how Oliver pulled off his con. They have a drink, fall in love faster than Oliver took that cashier’s money, and set off on a road trip to North Carolina, where Caroline’s mother, who left her when she was a baby, apparently lives.

Caroline and Oliver go on a road trip across the South, always looking for their next con. Oliver teaches Caroline all the tricks, from small change cons to pickpocketing. They avoid major cities and focus on small-town establishments and people, most of whom still carry cash. Seeing Caroline learn the art of the con and getting progressively better is fun to watch, and you can feel the love between her and Oliver grow with every dollar they steal.

But as their journey gets longer, their cons get bigger and more dangerous. They start by stealing the identity of a wealthy man aboard a train by pickpocketing him, pretending to work for the bank he has all of his money in, and faking a phone call with the bank’s security with Caroline on the other end acting as the security representative. It’s a perfectly executed sequence and one of the best scenes in the movie. Caroline and Oliver soon move to bank robbery, which begins as lucrative, until they are wanted across states for the robberies, and Caroline’s face is plastered on the news and papers, pushing their relationship to places neither thought they were capable of going.

Weaving and Gallner are superb as Caroline and Oliver. They have great chemistry together, making their surprisingly quick love story feel believable. Watching their descent from petty crooks to wanted by the FBI is captivating, and Weaving and Gallner elevate their performances the more intense the movie gets. Director Adam Rehmeier shoots the film with confidence and dusty grittiness, exploring the tiny towns Caroline and Oliver target with their schemes. The crime sequences are thrilling, and the quieter romantic sequences are delicate and beautiful.

There is a slight redundancy to Carolina Caroline, with some of the crime scenes feeling like a repetition of one we just recently saw. Where Carolina Caroline really fell short was in Caroline’s motivation and development. Her journey trying to find her mother got lost in the shuffle of her and Oliver’s crime spree, making the film’s emotional climax fall flat. Caroline’s search for her mother was the emotional crux of the film, yet if it were eliminated from the movie entirely, it might have made a better overall movie. I also felt that this took away from the development of Caroline as a character. I was more interested in the influence Oliver had on her and watching her descend into becoming a state-hopping crook, but her need to find her mother ultimately took away from this aspect.

Still, Carolina Caroline is a solid criminal romance thanks to the stellar work by Weaving and Gallner.

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