If you’re not familiar with the work of Adam Rehmeier, he made the harrowing The Bunny Game as a feature debut, later following up with Dinner in America, another distinctive, idiosyncratic film. Carolina Caroline is neither of those, in mood or intention. Instead it is a down-the-line crime drama seemingly designed to show Hollywood that Rehmeier can play quirk-free.
It’s a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing, with the emphasis firmly on the female party, a smart, hot young woman in a small nowhere town who one day realises a grift is taking place under her nose – a passing motorist is pulling it on the owner of the gas station where she works. It involves the grifter trying to change some bigger notes for smaller ones, then appearing to change his mind halfway through the transaction, which confuses the griftee into giving the grifter more money than he started with. Rehmeier shows us this move several times. It’s entirely confusing no matter how often it’s done. (It won’t, in any case, work in the cashless economy we have now all moved to.)
Cutting a long story short, Caroline (Samara Weaving) likes what she sees in Oliver (Kyle Gallner) and has soon, by force of her hotness, persuaded him into taking her under his wing. She learns the grifts – the money trick, hot-wiring cars, picking pockets and so on – and together the two of them head off along what is obviously a doomed road, or at least has been since Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda were pulling more or less the same stunts in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once in 1937.
Rehmeier’s films tend towards the state-of-the-nation statement and there’s something of that going on here, very quietly in the background, though his depiction of a world full of timeless Americana – Chevies and country music, loud shirts and cold beer – makes it unclear which America he’s addressing. Caroline is turned on by money, that much is certain. These updated desperadoes also seem to be using grifts, cons and, eventually, bank jobs, as some kind of payback for emotional damage picked up as they’ve lived their lives. Are we meant to feel their pain?
In what’s clearly meant to be the film’s psychological climax, Caroline meets the mother who abandoned her as a baby, in a darkened bar, where the old soak doesn’t give Caroline the welcome she might have hoped for. Kyra Sedgwick turns up the cackle to make it a memorable meeting, though the punch that should be there isn’t, because there’s just something too generic about the entire film.
This is a shame because Weaving is very good, as a naturally bright button held back at first by her small town’s restricted horizons. Taking very much the minor role, Gallner doesn’t have enough to do to make any real impression. Again, this is a shame, because he’s a very good actor. See Dinner in America for evidence of that.
Where it’s all leading seems obvious, and once Caroline and Oliver have become an item it feels like an exercise in box-ticking – the bank job going wrong, people getting shot who shouldn’t have got shot, a car chase involving swapping a hot vehicle for a cold one and the nearly-made-it-until-fate-intervened escape that wasn’t.
Looks great, Weaving sizzles in a series of outfits that show off her stuff. She has breasts, you might notice. The film entirely succeeds, if what you think it’s about is proving that Rehmeier can make films like everyone else does. Considering how weird The Bunny Game was and how refreshing Dinner in America, I’m not sure that Rehmeier really needed to do that. But do it he has.
Carolina Caroline – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
