Directors: Logan George, Celine Held
Writers: Logan George, Celine Held
Stars: Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Diana Hopper
Synopsis: When an 8-year-old girl disappears on Caddo Lake, a series of past deaths and disappearances begin to link together, altering a broken family’s history.
When a film announces it is produced by M. Night Shyamalan the natural reaction is to start anticipating what the sting in the tail of the tale will be. In Celine Held and Logan George’s Texan/Louisiana border set bayou and waterway mystery Caddo Lake there is a twist, but the narrative is not held captive to it. Caddo Lake paces itself, allowing the audience to care about the characters and their emotional arcs as much as their respective roles as moving pieces in a puzzle.
It begins by plunging the viewer into the deep via a car crash where the vehicle has driven off a bridge and into the lake. The sounds heard are thudding, a muffled voice crying out through water and a heartbeat. A young man (Dylan O’Brien) struggles to free the woman trapped in the driver’s seat. Only one of them survives.
Paris (O’Brien) hasn’t been able to move on since he lost his mother in the accident. He’s working removing detritus from Caddo Lake and living alone in a caravan next to an unfinished house. He’s trying to work out why his mother had the seizure that caused her to drive off the bridge and his father, Ben (Sam Jennings) is physically ill and worried his son’s obsession with the accident has trapped Paris in the past with no way to move on. A funeral of one of Ben’s fellow construction workers brings the possibility of Paris’ ex-girlfriend Cee (Diana Hopper) returning from Huston to the small town. Paris can’t imagine why she’d want to see him and stays away.
While Paris can’t seem to leave Caddo Lake, Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) can’t wait to get out. Her mother Celeste (Lauren Ambrose) has married a pastor Daniel Bennett (Eric Lang). Ellie’s eight-year-old stepsister Anna (Caroline Faulk) is about the only person she can stand to be around. The house they live in is only accessible via the lake and they aren’t in any manner wealthy, but it is better than when Celeste and Ellie were living in her car. Celeste seems settled with Daniel who is far from an awful guy – he’s just not Ellie’s dad and Celeste is extremely cagey about his disappearance and supposed death. Ellie wants to finish school and move on to college if possible. She turns up at the house to drop Anna off after school in her motorboat, argues with her mom, and heads to her friend’s house on the mainland. She can’t stand the crowded house where she feels like a permanent outsider. But when the adoring Anna goes missing, Ellie is the first to begin to search the labyrinthine waters tirelessly.
Cee isn’t going to leave the Lake Caddo area before seeing Paris. Their love affair was more than casual. The bones of the unfinished house were foundations laid for a life together before the accident damaged Paris physically and more pertinently, emotionally. Cee left because Paris ended their future dreams. The two still share a profound bond, and if there is anyone who can make Paris look towards the future again it is Cee.
The search for Anna intensifies. The lake is in drought which means predators like alligators are more daring. New marshes once covered in water are all over the place and regular maps are somewhat useless. The lake is disorienting even for experts like Ellie. It’s an eerie maze which seems to keep changing shape. Animals like wolves are appearing and they are not native to the region. Extinct species of moths flutter past. And there are places where Ellie and Paris are especially discombobulated. Anna’s life jacket turns up weather beaten. The more time the child spends exposed on the lake the less chance she has of surviving. Ellie blames herself, but not after blaming Celeste for settling there in the first place.
Caddo Lake is intensely atmospheric and urgent. It’s handsomely shot and the lake with its moss dripping trees, and mud bound inlets is captured with its odd phantasmagoria by Lowell A. Meyer. It’s a dangerous place, a beautiful place, an enigmatic place – and seemingly one which does not want to give up its mysteries easily. Including a series of missing or dead people over the years.
The downside to Caddo Lake is that it is crammed with too many mysteries. Held and George overcomplicate sections of the movie where a clearer line would have been to its benefit. The most powerful aspects of the film are the respective family and relationship dramas. Both O’Brien and Scanlen give engaging and emotional performances as two people bound inexorably to Lake Caddo who also find it difficult to connect to the world because of a parent lost to circumstances they can’t reconcile.
Despite over-egging some aspects of the film with multiple plot threads, Caddo Lake is a well-acted drama which comes together in a satisfying, if not completely convincing manner by the end. Dylan O’Brien can leave his teen and young adult stardom behind him and look forward to challenging roles such as the one he undertakes in Caddo Lake and Eliza Scanlen shows herself yet again to be a versatile actor. Caddo Lake is a solid mystery thriller with a powerful handle on mood and place, but most importantly, the stakes are connected first to the people and secondly to the puzzle.
