In Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox, playing a literal boy-eater, looked at Kyle Gallner, playing a goth classmate, the way a normal teenager might eye a bag of Doritos. There was no ambiguity about whether he would make it to the movie’s halfway mark. It was the continuation of a TV adolescence for Gallner, and part of his transition into scream-king roles in movies like the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, the Scream reboot, the Smile series, and Strange Darling, where the movie’s would-be tricky timeline scramble placed him on both sides of the killer/victim line, depending on the sequence of events. So it’s fair to expect some kind of untoward business when Oliver, played by Gallner in a thin mustache, strolls into a gas station at the outset of Carolina Caroline. Maybe he’ll murder someone. Maybe a hot girl will end him then and there.
Instead, Oliver pulls a shortchange scam on an unsuspecting register jockey. The counter guy’s co-worker Caroline (Samara Weaving) clocks him doing it, even if she doesn’t immediately understand exactly how or why he’s managed to walk away with more money than he came in with. (The movie, impressively, never explains it to the audience outright, either, preferring to tutor through repeated examples.) Caroline approaches Oliver and, as with Gallner, potential danger: Weaving has appeared in just as many horror movies, whether as a scrappy final girl in the Ready or Not movies or calculating killer in movies as varied (if often similarly crappy) as The Babysitter or Over Your Dead Body. Together, they’re a kill-or-be-killed B-movie power couple.
Maybe that’s why it somehow seems softly romantic when Oliver and Caroline really do hook up to enjoy each other’s company, and eventually pull scams together. No stalking, no killing; this is not a horror film. Director Adam Carter Rehmeier has an abiding love of schemes – his previous film was Snack Shack, a coming-of-age comedy where teenage buddies hustle to take over the local pool’s hot dog stand – and rooting them in periods where those schemes can’t rely too heavily on modern technology, specifically the dawns of new decades. Snack Shack takes place in the summer of 1991; Carolina Caroline unfolds about a decade later, when scams and robberies had to be just a little more handcrafted, with a bit more leeway than the post-9/11 surveillance state currently provides.
Oh, and yes: robberies. For a while, Oliver and Caroline work as a con artist pair, like a Southern version of Will Smith and Weaving’s doppelganger Margot Robbie in Focus, and the movie buzzes with romantic danger, aglow in analog-looking colors, particularly the red that often accompanies Caroline’s costumes. Caroline asks for reasoning about why it’s OK to rip people off this way, and Oliver provides it, though it’s really Gallner who’s so strangely convincing. After years of playing the harassed or worried-looking horror victim, he’s grown into a quietly commanding presence, with enough rough edge that when Oliver starts adding armed bank jobs to the couple’s repertoire, it’s believable both that he could be so reckless, and that Caroline would go along with this leveling up.
Eventually, she seems more purely addicted to it that he does; she’s the one who’s explicitly looking for something, having left her single dad (Jon Gries) in her small town, searching for the mother she never knew on the side of her outlaw romance. There’s obviously more than a bit of Bonnie and Clyde here, but it’s not that Oliver can’t quite perform sexually, like Clyde Barrow; it’s more that his antiheroic performance doesn’t seem to be enough for Caroline, even as she consumes him ravenously in their off-duty hours. Weaving’s good looks give her performances an outsized presence; she really does look like a cartoonier version of Robbie, with her big eyes and parted lips, suppressed Australian accent and all. She often looks as if she’s ready to chomp, whether scenery or otherwise. As Caroline, she yokes her disparate desires together: She is truly lip-bitingly attracted to Oliver (and, again, Gallner has no trouble making the case for himself), but that’s inextricable from her yearning to locate herself, whether that’s somewhere on the run or through her wayward mother. After so often appearing the picture of final-girl resilience, it’s touching to see Weaving apply such rawness without the outlet of violence. No matter her lust for bank scores, Caroline doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
That doesn’t mean that people won’t get hurt. As with Snack Shack, Rehmeier can’t resist a sentimental streak. His genre instincts are razor sharp, only for him to solemnly lay down his weapons at crucial junctures, as if concerned that dazzlement will prove too distracting. Carolina Caroline recognizes the stylish kick of its characters’ movie-star abilities, the cinematic charge of attractive people taking what doesn’t belong to them; it’s too lovingly photographed and too keyed into Gallner and Weaving’s charms to become purely cautionary. Yet Rehmeier also does a remarkably clear-eyed work in his refusal to turn romance into doomy, cliché-ridden romanticization. Carolina Caroline recognizes something bittersweet in the short career of most criminals. Con artistry may be practiced by people of ages, but that much lying is still a young person’s game.
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