Strange things are happening at Caddo Lake. Drought-induced shallow waters exposes a series of past deaths and disappearances, forever altering a broken family’s history in the mysterious new genre thriller from writer/director team Celine Held & Logan George (“Servant”). What begins as a mysterious Southern thriller centered around a missing child quickly gives way to a mind-bending, twisty sci-fi film with an intense emotional center. Though impressive for its meticulous plotting and intricate tangled knots, the genre thriller struggles with its dual story structure.
An intense flashback sequence that follows the lethal aftermath of a car crashing into Caddo Lake, a small bayou town on the border of Texas and Louisiana, introduces the lead character Paris (Love and Monster‘s Dylan O’Brien). The solemn young man works in the bayou, still dazed and traumatized by the shocking loss of his mother in that crash. It’s deeply fractured his relationships with his dad (Sam Hennings) and girlfriend Cee (Diana Hopper). Elsewhere in Caddo Lake is the film’s other lead, Ellie (Old‘s Eliza Scanlen), a smart, independent teen unable to find common ground with her mom, Celeste (Lauren Ambrose), after the disappearance of her dad. It doesn’t help that Celeste is volatile and short-tempered, despite stepdad Daniel (Eric Lange) and 8-year-old stepsister Anna’s (Caroline Falk) best attempts to keep the peace between the estranged mother and daughter.
When someone on Caddo Lake goes missing, Paris and Ellie both find themselves on bizarre journeys that only get weirder the further they venture into the bayou.
Every detail, even seemingly inconsequential, is crucial to connecting the pieces in this intricately woven mystery. Details that often come with weighty payoffs in the third act. Until then, though, Held & George rely on the central question of what’s happening on Caddo Lake to drive its narrative. In other words, Caddo Lake plays it extremely close to the chest, withholding answers for a large stretch of the runtime. Instead, it keeps its focus on the parallel yet overlapping stories of Paris and Ellie, two Caddo Lake residents on separate emotional journeys connected only loosely by the strange temporal anomalies throwing their messy lives into further disarray.
While the pervasive questions of what’s happening effectively reel you in and keep you invested, that’s less so when it comes to one of its leads, throwing the dual storyline structure into disarray. Both Paris and Ellie come with a lot of emotional baggage unpacked throughout the film, but it’s Ellie’s defiant determination and vulnerability that earns rooting interest. Scanlen’s explosive scenes with Ambrose’s flawed mother pushed to the brink go much farther than the underwritten Paris, leaving O’Brien stranded with a one-note glum performance. Paris is solely defined by his mother’s absence, and that also winds up leaving the character without nearly as high of emotional stakes as Ellie. It creates pacing lulls when the narrative is focused on Paris, compared to the far livelier Ellie.
Held & George seem more focused on developing the twisty, mind-bending turns that Caddo Lake doles out than developing their leads beyond a visceral sense of anguish. On that, they’re far more successful, creating a carefully plotted knot of sci-fi surprises and visually inventive moments, even if at least one seems to defy the established genre parameters without much explanation. The filmmakers excel at layering in clues and scenes that take on new meaning with every new reveal. Held & George also have a knack for creating striking imagery in a fairly nondescript but atmospheric bayou, where every turn of Ellie’s boat gives a similar view of Cypress trees.
What begins as a conventional setup for a crime thriller transforms into a cerebral genre thriller caught up in its meticulous details. It’s those details and the way that Held & George unwind them for maximum tension that impresses. Scanlen carries the movie deftly on her capable shoulders, with Ambrose and Lange injecting affecting pathos in a supporting capacity, even when the character development is stretched paper thin. While Caddo Lake doesn’t quite earn its emotional ending to resonate and is prone to feeling like two films at odds with each other, the connecting sci-fi mystery and its winding road to answers show a lot of potential in the budding feature filmmakers.
Caddo Lake premieres on Max on October 10.
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