Publication Date: 06-08-2026

Carolina Caroline (2026) review

Dir. Adam Carter Rehmeier

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

Writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier has had a busy decade. His film Dinner in America saw a low-key release amidst the pandemic. Thanks to TikTok users‘ propensity to look outside the box for entertainment, the violent-yet-disarmingly-sweet romantic-comedy — one of the very best films of the 2020s so far — found a larger audience. Two years ago, Rehmeier released Snack Shack, another winning coming-of-age story about two teens tasked with restoring and operating a food/drink stand at a local community pool.

On the cusp of 50, Rehmeier is older than most of the actors and their respective characters in his movies, but through his writing and his depiction of hyper-specific yet universal situations, he clearly has retained a youthfulness that makes his work feel authentic. He reminds me a great deal of Larry Clark, another director not only famous for his stories about teens, but whose first film didn’t happen until he was 51. Rehmeier’s movies aren’t as intense as Clark’s, and they’re significantly more misfits in suburbia than delinquents in a concrete urban jungle, but the man is so strong at establishing mood and dimensional characters that you find yourself unable to take your eyes off of whatever scene he crafts.

Which brings me to his latest, Carolina Caroline, the first film Rehmeier has worked on without a formal writing credit. Apparently, he radically reworked quite a bit of the story’s focus after the first act. It’s a competent but oh-so regurgitated story about star-crossed lovers (Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner) who double as criminals. They barrel down the byways of America in classic cars, rob banks, don wigs, use phony credentials, and screw like jackrabbits in their downtime. Born to run, they might as well be living a Bruce Springsteen song. Or their own version of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Or Bonnie and Clyde. Or They Live by Night. Or Queen & Slim. Or any other variation of the lovers-turned-robbers template that is as American as apple pie.

Caroline (Weaving) gets by as a cashier at a gas station in rural Texas, her father (Jon Gries) her sole guardian since her mother abandoned her. One day, in walks Oliver (Gallner), who pulls the okedoke on Caroline’s boss with a game of quick-change — my slow-ass would’ve definitely gotten got; I had to read the Wikipedia blurb about the scam three times before I understood it — and further sells it with a smile. After Oliver leaves, Caroline races out to meet him. The two then hit the road and travel all across the American south, intent on upping their racket from slick-Rick sleight-of-hand games to hometown bank robberies. In time, Caroline will come face-to-face with her Caroline’s boozehound mother. Kyra Sedgwick delivers a scene-stealing performance in, like a lot of what came before it, fails to leave much of an impression on the larger material.

Much of Rehmeier’s film — written by William Thomas Dean IV, whose name suggests he’ll one day write a great American novel — is conducted in what amounts to a montage of Caroline and Oliver driving, plotting, robbing, sexing, and having those kinds of dreamy, whispered conversations only people in love in the movies have. Jean-Philippe Bernier shoots the hell out of these rundown, dilapidated locales, most of which probably boasting a “historic downtown” and a restaurant in which a waitress calls everybody “hon.” Many exterior shots are tinted green, as if a tornado is near, which evokes a sort of swampy ominousness to the material. The soundtrack is heavy on contemporary folk and Americana tracks, much to my delight, including Jason Isbell and Margo Cilker, who is quickly going to become a new favorite, I can already tell. Similar to Dinner in America, there’s an inherent timelessness to the material that’s not explicitly modern yet not definitively retro.

Weaving shines in her role, imbuing Caroline with enough street-smarts not to make her totally susceptible to the kinds of games Gallner’s Oliver clearly enjoys playing. She might want to kick the dust up and get money through nefarious means, but she’s not going to get scammed in the long run. Kyle Gallner has quickly vaulted up my mental list of favorite actors working today, but I find him if only slightly miscast as Oliver. Gallner has this rugged, time-bomb kind of energy that’s willing to explode at any moment. Oliver is far more softspoken and eloquent than typical Gallner characters. If Gallner doesn’t have a counterbalance of rage or at least urgency in a character like this, he tends to dissolve into someone who sounds like he learned how the world works thanks to Reddit — evident in a dinner scene in which he gabs to Caroline, convincing her that humans don’t really make decisions at all.

The sweetness of the material goes beyond the (mostly tame) sex-scenes. It’s the fact that Oliver at least reveals that he might be a two-bit conman, but Caroline is not nor will ever be one of his targets. This sort of agreement is established early, and the longer you watch Carolina Caroline, you realize that Dean’s script isn’t one for risk-taking. It’s content on playing the familiar chords because they sound nice. That they do, but a curveball would be nice in what amounts to nine innings of sliders. We’ve already enjoyed Dinner in America. This is more of an appetizer.

Starring: Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, Jon Gries, and Kyra Sedgwick. Directed by: Adam Carter Rehmeier.