One of the lead characters in the original film “Caddo Lake” by Max that features the fractured two-handed narrative of Paris Long has someone saying, “If you can’t explain yourself, there’s not a chance you’re going anywhere.” It seems to me that this film might not be as comprehensible to the audience, therefore, I may be in trouble.
Then again, that isn’t necessarily the “plot hole” some people seem to be fixated on. It can even be convenient when the film does not try to touch upon every single plot point, being more emotionally driven instead. Some people are going to completely lose their heads over what the big Caddo Lake twist is, where even the network has asked me not to discuss it. I found it great to watch a film, which looked like a generic streaming thriller but evolved into something much different. It’s always good to have two leads who fully own their roles rather than bring dramatic weight to the film by acting like it is a particularly simple premise, as this one undoubtedly is. Or perhaps they could have called it “Cuckoo Lake.”
This isn’t a fictitious location like Caddo Lake, which in reality is swamp and woods at the Texas-Louisianna border.
Writing and directing the movie is the duo of Logan George & Celine Held (who worked on three episodes of “Servant” which reasoned M. Night Shyamalan producing this flick), took cues from the raw energy emanating from you Caddo Lake. This is a place of danger that has been embedded in the lives of the Caddo tribes through generations. The filmmakers have created a story of three victims lost in this place where even the most dreadful imagine bond their fates and again, I apologize for the fact that I shot it out in oxygen where I shouldn’t have done so.
Paris (Dylan O’Brien, who at the same time can be seen in another role, this one of Dan Aykroyd in “Saturday Night”) is stressed over the fact that his mother died, having some sort of a convulsion when driving, throwing Paris off a bridge. Throughout the story, this particle of survivor’s guilt stays with O’Brien’s character who convincingly portrays the son of a woman who takes it upon himself to comprehend what had transpired with his mother and aggressively approaches her physician in a car park for explanations. However, he feels that there’s something more fundamental about the incident and the event, the underworld of Caddo Lake.
Another character is Ellie, portrayed by Eliza Scanlen (excellent in ‘Sharp Objects’) who yearns for a father she never met and has an adversarial relationship with her mother, Lauren Ambrose, another link to the underappreciated ‘Servant’. Her stepfather Daniel (Eric Lange) tries to rebuild bridges that are clearly burnt but Ellie is a desert, a character who seems to have one friend only in the form of her 8 year old stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk). After a domestic quarrel, Ellie runs to the lake with Anna in hot pursuit, who then completely vanishes without a trace. This vanishing act will connect Ellie’s storyline in Paris in a fashion that would be considered ludicrous had I offered you a million bets to begin with.
One of the causes for that is that for quite a good number of viewers who are blue collar “Caddo Lake” is a straight forward blue collar drama. In fact, the only indication that the viewer will eventually get disappointed is Shyamalan’s name as a producer and how genre-crazy this season is for streamers during this time of the year. This does not even go sideways. It goes sideways in the appendices, forwards in the preface, and backwards in the conclusion all the time in a manner which is rather confusing, but it is really about the how much you love the wrestling with the difficulty of it all.
Voicing all those concerns, this viewer who watches way too many films whose narrative surprise can be detected in the first ten frames, admires “Caddo Lake” for its construction of plots even if I am pretty sure without a pen and paper I could not tell it. Again, it is extremely beneficial to have actors that exhibit urgency instead of the profession and O’Brien and Scanlen do exactly this. Making these hopeless characters feel emotions while destroying the plot on how this narrative is now twisted is not an easy task but these actors manage to do talents of this magnitude.
The climax is understandably disappointing wherein a lot of reliance is placed on Ellie’s google search as the film attempts its best to pull the dots together but for a film that one should ideally watch completely oblivious to the plot, this is quite excusable as it is interesting to see the family drama come together in those chaotic settings that one only finds in Caddo Lake.
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