The TIFF Film Review: Adam Carter Rehmeier’s “Carolina Caroline“
By Ross
World Premiere – United States of America | 2025 | 105m | English
“How do you know if you are a good person pretending to be bad? Or a bad person pretending to be good?” asks our Caroline, played radiantly by Samara Weaving (“Guns Akimbo“), framing this somewhat modernized Bonnie and Clyde ride to the top of the Most Wanted list in director Adam Carter Rehmeier’s crackling good road movie, “Carolina Caroline“. Stumbling down the stairs of a stereotypical two-story motel, pulling out a gun on the casual driver of a red pickup, is the first we see of this young woman.
After stealing her getaway vehicle with barely a tinge of nervousness, she discards her black wig, trying in her own internal way to return to the young woman she once was, filling the shelves of a gas station. She bites her lip with the faint wisp of a faraway dream hanging about her, drawing us in completely to her two-sided moral coin. It’s a clever rewind that captivates, and as written by Tom Dean (“Charlie Harper“) with a sharp, slick charm, much like the handsome grifter that walks into a gas station and alters the star-struck Caroline in those first few moments, we can’t help but want to join them.
And who can blame us, or her? Kyle Gallner (“Strange Darling“), as the con artist drifter, is as sexy, compelling, and intoxicating as anyone could hope for, pulling us onto the dance floor with ease to the sound of the titular country music song by Jonathan Edwards, played slow and steady. He’s a charmer of the highest of gangster order, in such a way that we can’t help but want to join him there, desiring with all our hearts to be held tight and whisked away. He’s obviously one of those dangerously seductive men, the kind your mother warned you about but can’t be denied. It’s as stereotypical as it sounds, but also the most familiar story that we all know so well. And love. Like Bonnie to Clyde, we can’t help ourselves.
We see her fall for him, in the way Weaving suggestively bites her lip uncontrollably, and gazes into his eyes, demanding, in her own way, that he also must want her as bad as she wants him. She jumps headfirst into that growling roadster of his, happily, yearning for more than the small, listless life she is living with her loving single father, played solidly by the gifted Jon Gries (“The White Lotus“). Leaving that dusty, dull world, Caroline openly and giddily wants to learn from this sly conman. She practices everything — from slicing a few dollars away from the sales clerk to pickpocketing a businessman on his way. But it’s bank robbing that really turns the tables, shifting their exciting road trip to some greater moneyed glory, that becomes an endless adrenaline ride toward fortune. With an outcome that we see coming miles away.
Caroline is almost drunk with the excitement, until she comes face to face with her history and possibly her future, in the form of the incredible Kyra Sedgwick (“The Closer“) as the woman who left her behind years ago. It’s a reunion that breaks the rose-colored glasses, in a way, and, like their counterparts, Bonnie and Clyde, when things go wrong, they go wrong in the biggest of ways, sending Caroline into a tailspin that wasn’t part of the getaway plan.
With its dusty motels, stolen pickups, and slow country ballads, “Carolina Caroline” captures the mythic pulse of Americana while charting the moral drift of a woman on the run. Rehmeier (“Dinner in America”) finds the core truth in this seduction, and it sizzles and crackles with undeniable chemistry. Gallner and Weaving ride that wild, intoxicating wave, dancing out the details in an authentic yet classic Western tableau, slicing small-town Americana as seamlessly as those first few grifts. We fly off with them, like birds on a wire, ready to take flight, even as we know the quarry plunge is coming. “Carolina Caroline” isn’t just a road movie or an outlaw romance echoing Bonnie and Clyde; it’s a fever-dream of temptation and consequence, where every stolen kiss and every stolen dollar propels Caroline closer to the person she believes she wants to be — and to the inevitable crash when she realizes her mistake.
