Big swing from Adam Rehmeier. He went from small snack shack‘s in Nebraska to a big Bonnie and Clyde modern update across the American South. I guess a summer making bank makes you want to see if you can aim bigger and better as a director. Carolina Caroline isn’t as great as the classic it’s aiming for, but it gets more right than it doesn’t…and raises some serious concerns about small banks in the South. Maybe that’s why the couple avoided Texas and the conceal carry rampancy.
Caroline (Samara Weaving) is one of those lost souls: she’s trapped in a dead end job in a gas station, in a dead end life in dead end Texas. She was, that is, until Oliver (Kyle Gallner) walks into the station, trying his standard con to get an extra twenty dollars out of someone. After the initial disgust, Caroline is completely turned on by this interloper, who’s planted the idea in her head that she can go wherever she wants. After a couple more meetups, Oliver becomes equally into Caroline, and agrees to take her across the South, teaching her how to “see the angles and systems” like he does.
Carolina Caroline falls apart if the two leads don’t work. We’ve got to feel the danger coming from them, but that proximity also turns up the heat as their schemes get bigger and bigger. Rehmeier has landed the greatest score of all, getting the coolest indie girl, Samara Weaving, and coolest indie guy, Kyle Gallner to be his Bonnie and Clyde. Weaving is great here, using that lip bite and her wide eyes to make it easy to fall in love with her. Caroline wears her heart on her sleeve, necessary for the movie to shift from sexy danger to danger danger. Gallner falls into the role he’s comfortable in: the mysterious badass. There’s some of the menace in his other performances, but broadly speaking, his Oliver is much more empathetic than his other characters. He finds just the right amount of fear and intrigue that would make someone like Caroline fall in love with him. They’re so electric together I almost preferred the scenes of them off the clock, watching their relationship grow and evolve as the pair go deeper into their crime spree.
As for the story, we get a mish mesh of classic crime storytelling: lay out the rules, mention the ones you CANNOT break, then eventually break them and risk the consequences, stuff we’ve seen before. The reason Carolina Caroline works is because all these items are brought up during the flirty meet cutes between Oliver and Caroline; you’re barely paying attention cause you’re transfixed at the sizzle going on right in front of you. Rehmeier doesn’t have the Bonnie & Clyde budget to do big action sequences, instead relying on implied intensity conveyed by his two leads. The getaway after the robberies feels tense because Rehmeier keeps the camera in between the couple, living in their state so we don’t need bullets or giant crashes to feel something. He saves all the big stuff for the final act, where he ratchets up the tension to the max wonderfully, but smartly because we’re right there with Caroline and Oliver, panicked unsure how to get out of this bigger system they were unprepared for.
I know Obsession might seem like the date night movie of the moment, but I’d strongly consider y’all giving Carolina Caroline a go. It’s level of sexy danger will most importantly not lead to an argument about what happens, instead just leading to a few lip bites and smolders during the movie. Just be sure to thank Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner at some point. Keep it cool you two!