A pair of young lovers embark on a road trip and a life of crime in 2026's Carolina Caroline. Critics have compared the film to Bonnie and Clyde and True Romance and it's likely both films were influences. But while Carolina Caroline is an interesting film noir, it lacks the courage to stand on equal ground with those earlier films.
Caroline (Samara Weaving) is a small town girl, working at a convenience store, when she overhears a handsome young man named Oliver (Kyle Gallner) duping her employer with a simple confidence trick. When the clerk tries to give Oliver his change for a small purchase, Oliver asks to have the larger bill and from there tricks the man into giving back double the change so that Oliver essentially gets his item for free. Caroline sees what he did and follows him outside to confront him about it. Instead of turning him in, Caroline joins him in his wanderings and the two make a living off this same trick.
No-one else ever figures out what Oliver's doing, which I guess makes Caroline an abnormally intelligent person. Except we, the audience, can see how simple the trick is and it seems implausible that no-one else ever picks up on it. The film indulges in a kind of naive, narcissistic fantasy. Oliver also waxes philosophical about how theirs is a victimless crime, going on to say how what they're really doing is sticking it to shareholders in a triumph against capitalism.
This isn't good enough for Caroline, though, who doesn't just want to survive. She wants to be fabulously rich so they start robbing banks. And yet, she's presented as the moral centre of the film and she's horrified when things inevitably escalate.
Gallner's performance projects a little too much smugness so that it's especially implausible that he's able to fool so many people. Weaving's performance is a little better and she's certainly gorgeous with an extraordinary figure. She's framed as the moral centre but she's really a femme fatale, personally responsible for Oliver's downfall, which makes for an interesting shift in narrative perspective.
The film takes too many shortcuts in its conceptualising to be on the level of an Out of the Past or Double Indemnity but it's about at the level of Gun Crazy, which the film most reminded me of.
I struggled to place the time period in which the movie's set. Oliver drives a '70s car and their clothing and hairstyles both look very '70s but then I started noticing many of the cars in the background looked like they came from the '80s. When I googled to find out when the movie's supposed to be set, I was surprised to find out it's supposed to be the late '90s. I suspect the film was originally meant to be set in the '70s but then they ran into budget issues and started using whatever vintage cars and props they could get their hands on. There's a reference to Cowboy Bebop at the end so maybe they decided it an alternate stylistic universe.
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