Carolina Caroline (2026)

I’m the type of cinema lover who watches movies strictly for the story. I don’t care about production values or big-budget soundtracks. While great acting is appreciated when and if it happens, it isn't a dealbreaker for me as long as the narrative holds up. That’s why I usually gravitate toward independent cinema, foreign films, and low-budget horror. I fully accept that many great plots rely on a character making one initial bad decision. However, the main character in Adam Carter Rehmeier's Carolina Caroline makes so many terrible choices that the story shifts from engaging to absolutely infuriating.

Carolina Caroline follows Caroline (Samara Weaving), a bored young woman dreaming of escaping a small Texas town where nothing ever happens. When she meets Oliver (Kyle Gallner) at her workplace while he is conning the owner, she sees her perfect opportunity to get out. Their whirlwind romance strongly echoes Bonnie and Clyde, as the two quickly embark on a bank-robbing spree.

In my opinion, main characters should be written to be, if not entirely relatable, at least sympathetic to some degree. Yet, I felt absolutely nothing for Caroline from the start. Desperate to escape a boring small-town life, she meets a guy she is instantly attracted to, discovers he is a con artist, and immediately decides to learn the trade herself. I don't think I've ever seen a protagonist make so many terrible decisions in a single film. In fact, I didn't think a two-hour movie even had the narrative space to hold that many thoughtless choices. A multi-episode TV series has the time to stretch out that kind of compounding recklessness, but a movie simply suffocates under it.

The first bad decision Caroline makes is when she pressures Oliver to teach her to con people. The second mistake follows immediately after: within a matter of days, she believes she has mastered the craft and convinces Oliver to rob banks. This sudden shift is as mind-boggling as it is reckless. Up until this point, their operations required actual strategy, using their intelligence as their weapon. Robbing banks relies purely on violence. On that note, there’s nothing I hate more when I’m watching movies than when a character keeps repeating that they’re really smart, but their actions tell you otherwise. Isn’t the whole point of good fiction “show, don’t tell”?

Caroline makes yet another agonizing decision when she announces she wants to track down the woman who gave birth to her in South Carolina, a mother who abandoned her before her first birthday. I can't tell if the writers intended to give Caroline deeper emotional dimensions, or if they simply used this reunion as a convenient device to force the road trip forward. Regardless, tracking her down proves to be a traumatic experience for Caroline. The phrase "beating a dead horse" immediately came to mind the moment she insists on driving to South Carolina. What exactly did she expect to find? A sympathetic sob story? Sudden maternal remorse?