‘Carolina Caroline’ Review: A Classic Lovers-on-the-Run Thriller

With nothing holding her down but a dead-end job and an aging dad, a small-town Texan girl is swiftly bedazzled by a smooth criminal drifter, and hops into his car to pursue a life less ordinary. The premise of “Carolina Caroline” could be copy-pasted from innumerable American road movies, from landmarks like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Badlands” to far paler imitations, and where it heads from that point isn’t particularly novel either. But Adam Carter Rehmeier‘s thriller, like many a good B-movie, adds up to more than the sum of its parts, with star power and star chemistry its major elevating, unquantifiable factors. Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner, two fine actors rarely granted the glow that comes with a proper star vehicle, positively bask in it here; together, they give a potentially standard film an active heart rate.

Which isn’t to disregard Rehmeier’s direction, or indeed the crisp, efficient script by William Thomas Dean IV: Both work within a firm genre tradition, but bring enough texture and humanity to proceedings to keep them from feeling strictly generic. Released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures following a Toronto premiere last year, “Carolina Caroline” deserves to find a dedicated following. And that’s something Rehmeier knows to patiently wait for, after his 2020 sophomore feature “Dinner in America” earned TikTok-boosted cult status (and a belated theatrical release) a whole four years after its quietly received Sundance competition bow. Bigger assignments surely await him.

Though Weaving and Gallner are hardly unknown quantities — both are recognizable to mainstream audiences for their work in franchise horror — “Carolina Caroline” does feel like a reintroduction of sorts. Each is cast to a classic all-American type (restless good girl and soulful bad boy, respectively) that brings out something disarming and previously unseen in their screen presence; together, their connection is so instant and so electric that it stings the film into motion. Following a slightly unnecessary flash-forward prologue, the setup is quick and persuasive: Caroline (Weaving), a bored cleaner at a gas-station store, spots handsome crook Oliver (Gallner) playing a complicated, banknote-swapping con trick on the elderly cashier, and is interested right away. So are we.

She confronts him, not to right the wrong but to get his attention; before long, he’s teaching her his ways, and she proves a quick study. Though she’s close to her father (Jon Gries), who has raised her since her mother skipped town many years ago, she’s weary of Texas, and Oliver satisfies both her wanderlust and her regular lust. The actors are so fizzy and sexy together that we, like Caroline, can initially see their petty criminal exploits — the cash scam, shoplifting, some light pickpocketing — as just a bit of a game, mere foreplay to their lovemaking on a bed scattered with stray dollar bills. When things escalate to bank robbery, however, the tone shifts, and Weaving’s wide-eyed but canny performance shows the guilty conscience gradually intruding on Caroline’s hopped-up exhilaration.

Gallner, meanwhile, keeps Oliver just unknowable enough to sustain an edgy crackle of tension. His drawling, winking charm is front and center, and his attraction to our heroine feels both genuine and even quite protective, but his violent streak is so blasé as to be unnerving. For a man who has an answer to everything, he appears momentarily stumped when Caroline earnestly asks, “How do you know if we’re good people pretending to be bad, or bad people pretending to be good?” (We can’t be sure either.) Still, they press on toward South Carolina, a destination chosen by Caroline in the vague hope of reuniting with her long-lost mother. With one acidic cameo from Kyra Sedgwick, that sentimental fantasy is cruelly punctured: the beginning of the end of Caroline’s rogue American dream.

“Carolina Caroline’s” sense of period is flexible, pulling freely from past and present: Rehmeier loads the soundtrack with contemporary throwback country from the likes of Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton, while the film’s sweaty, straight-ahead genre storytelling harkens back to the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. But it’s actually set in a hazy mid-’90s midsummer — tangibly conjured by Jean-Philippe Bernier’s saturated, sunburnt lensing — chiefly defined by the absence of cellphones, and a greater simplicity of consequences. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for an era when credit card fraud was performed with a more personal touch, and when it was easier for a person so inclined to just get lost in America.