Carolina Caroline Review: Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner Light Up a Sexy, Vintage Southern Crime Thriller
Weaving and Gallner play a bank-robbing couple in this romantic thriller from Dinner in America director Adam Carter Rehmeier
by Alex Kaan 4 June 2026
Magnolia Pictures
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if there ever was a film that lived by that old adage, it is Carolina Caroline. Even as it barrels towards an inevitably violent conclusion, Adam Carter Rehmeier’s film is a refreshingly small-scale crime thriller that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but rather takes the genre on a joyride while smartly keeping the focus on its two charismatic leads.
The film follows Caroline, a wide-eyed young woman (Samara Weaving) stuck in a dead-end job at a gas station in her small Texas town. One day, she catches a traveller, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), in a simple con as he dupes her elderly boss into giving him a $20 bill after only handing over $11. She goes to confront him, but they soon find themselves on a date at a local bar. As Oliver reveals the details of his lifestyle, Caroline falls fast for both the charismatic man and his dangerous lifestyle. Before she knows it, she’s learning his tricks as they hustle their way through the American South, tumbling into a heady love affair fuelled by sex and crime, and becoming the kind of couple whose idea of dirty talk is planning bank robberies.
Magnolia Pictures
A lovers-on-the-run thriller in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde and Wild at Heart, Carolina Caroline is a stylish crime romance coasting on the charm of its stellar country soundtrack and the sizzling chemistry between Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner. While there are plenty of unnerving moments, the film sees the scream queen and king take a break from their usual horror fare and deliver a pair of equally vulnerable performances with a healthy dose of movie star magnetism. Their free-spirited dynamic carries the film, and the movie has a lot of fun with a slew of alternative forms of foreplay in which Oliver teaches Caroline the rules and logic behind a good con.
While Gallner’s character is shrouded in a mystique that only adds to the character’s appeal, Weaving provides the film’s emotional core. Jon Gries and Kyra Sedgwick appear in bit parts as her parents, an unexpectedly sunny father and a rough-edged mother who abandoned Caroline as a baby, and Weaving’s tender interactions with each of them give a tragic context to her gradually unravelling life of crime.
Magnolia Pictures
Carolina Caroline may be an especially character-driven film, but cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier, production designer Francesca Palomb, and costume designers Anaïs Castaldi and Hannah Greenblatt are likewise responsible for the film’s appeal — capturing a rich, intimate portrait of an American South from a distant past.
An endearingly old-school crime drama, Carolina Caroline is a seductive romantic thriller led by an impeccable Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner.