In Caddo Lake’s hectic opening moments, Paris (Dylan O’Brien) fails to save his mother, trapped underwater in a car she has driven off a bridge during a mysterious seizure. From there unfolds a winding science-fiction thriller that makes great use of its unique location — a 25,000 acre lake and bayou on the border of Texas and Louisiana. Picking up a few years after the prologue, we find Paris working on a boat in the lake, its water level low. He understandably has yet to really get over his mother’s death, and in fact thinks there was something more to it than a typical seizure. As he investigates her medical history, finding a link with certain dynamics of the lake, we also meet Ellie (Eliza Scanlin), who lives elsewhere on the lake’s shores.
Ellie is a teenager with an extremely contentious family life, born of her father leaving when she was a baby, according to her mother Celeste (Lauren Ambrose). Also in the picture are her stepfather Daniel (Eric Lange) and her stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk), who adores Ellie, and goes missing one night trying to follow her in a dinghy across the lake to a friend’s house, after a particularly nasty argument with Celeste. As Ellie later searches the lake for Anna, and as Paris searches it for answers about his mother, they both begin to separately experience strange, very brief events, where they seem to slip through fields of energy, for just a split second.
While some of the family drama feels a little bit old hat at first, the sci-fi elements really get into gear about midway, are deftly handled, and actually complicate the family matters to a surprising and delightfully confusing degree. What begins as a series of things out of place — Anna somehow bringing home a collection of moths that a family member says are long extinct; Paris seeing wolves in the distance at one point, almost seeming to walk on water in the bayou — soon becomes a serpentine knot of a movie, as characters race to save one another, to try to set certain things right, and to try to figure out what’s going on with those energy field slippages.
Not to be overlooked is that there’s also some impressive kinetic pleasure just in watching characters cruise in their boats around the massive lake, carving through the water, surrounded by old and majestic cypress trees. O’Brien also proves one of the film’s highlights, boasting a certain wounded presence as Paris, but also delivering a top-notch physical performance, whether he’s dexterously wading through the bayou or sprinting handcuffed through a hospital. And while some may find the film’s plot either too winkingly clever or else too confounding, there’s a certain satisfaction in the process of seeing the threads that make up the narrative knots play themselves out, with some winding up untangled and resolved, while others are thankfully left to linger and fray.
DIRECTOR: Celine Held & Logan George; CAST: Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Lauren Ambrose, Eric Lange; DISTRIBUTOR: Max; STREAMING: October 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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