The two plot their journey from Louisville, Kentucky, to Los Angeles, planning to visit infamous murder sites along the way which Carrie can photograph for Brian's book.

He then knocks Brian unconscious before kidnapping Carrie, driving her to the abandoned Dreamland nuclear testing site on the California-Nevada border.

As Brian sifts through tapes made with his voice recorder during their trip, Carrie tells him that a gallery in Venice is interested in her art.

As they depart, Brian unintentionally leaves a recording running, which reveals a "thank you" message Adele covertly left at the end of a tape.

In Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of Road Movies writers Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson note that the film presents doubled images of the two couples, "contrary rituals of affirmation" between Early and Adele, and Brian and Carrie, which demonstrate their social and class-related disparities.

[7] Sargeant and Watson also interpret the character of Carrie as an androgyne that "offers a threat to order" in the dynamics among Early, Adele, and Brian.

Between November 1990 and March 1991, Metcalfe completed two rewrites of the script to implement changes requested by Sena and Propaganda Films.

[3] The characters of Brian and Carrie were given professions as a writer and a photographer, respectively, while retaining the original premise to share a ride with a serial killer.

Brad Pitt was cast as the violent Early Grayce, as he had been seeking out a role that was at odds with the wholesome "pretty boy" image he had portrayed in Thelma & Louise (1991) and A River Runs Through It (1992).

[11] Juliette Lewis was cast in the role while still completing production on Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), and had been in a relationship with Pitt at the time.

[11][12] In the role of Carrie, Michelle Forbes was cast after she completed an audition in Los Angeles, as Sena felt she possessed the cool aloofness of the character.

[12] Some of the film's early scenes were shot in an old industrial area west of downtown Atlanta[13] and in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood,[14] after which the production moved westward through various locations in California.

After premiering at the Montreal World Film Festival in August 1993, Kalifornia was released theatrically in the United States on September 3, 1993 at 359 theaters.

The site's consensus reads: "Visually strong and featuring a potently feral performance from Brad Pitt, Kalifornia is a tonally uneven thriller marked by all-too-obvious themes".

"[6] Leonard Klady of Variety also praised the performances of the lead cast and likened the film to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), deeming it "an extremely handsome production imbued with a chilling, surrealistic sensibility.

And although the script suffers from an ending that doesn't have that much to say that's fresh about remorseless murderers, the trip is worth taking because we meet four indelible characters in one compelling scene after another.

"[21] Joe Brown of The Washington Post was dismissive of the film on the grounds of its violent material, deeming it a "new nadir in nauseating nihilism".

[22] Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan noted that though the film is visually "slick and stylish", it "doesn't make the encroaching mayhem any easier to take," and felt that the performances of Pitt and Lewis registered as "mannered and even a trifle repetitive".

[23] Some critics, such as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, felt certain elements of the script were "preposterous",[24] while the Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro deemed it a "pretentious B movie".

[25] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly made similar criticisms, writing that, "from its inception, Kalifornia...  throws all dramatic sense out the window," and ultimately described it as a "a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

"[26] Owen McNally of the Hartford Courant, though praising of the performances, wrote: "If you hop aboard this sick, unjoyful ride, you'd better bail out early.

[28] The DVD edition featured both unrated and theatrical cuts of the film in pan and scan and widescreen aspect ratios.