Someone says to Paris Long, one of the dual protagonists of Max’s original film “Caddo Lake,” “If you can’t explain yourself, you’re not going anywhere.” I’m not sure I could fully explain this movie, so I might be in trouble.
However, that’s not always the issue the internet “plot hole” checkers and purists would have you believe. Sometimes it’s even preferable if a film doesn’t connect all of its dots, working more in an emotional register than a practical one, trusting viewers to meet the movie halfway. Some people are going to freak out over the major twist of “Caddo Lake” that I can’t even write about by request of the network, but I found it refreshing to see a movie that feels like a traditional streaming thriller but reveals itself to be something very different. It also helps to have a pair of leads who commit to the immediacy of their characters, never winking at the camera like lesser performers would with a script that’s this fundamentally insane. They could have called it “Cuckoo Lake.”
That’s not a real place like Caddo Lake, which really looks more like a collection of swamp and woods on the border between Texas and Louisiana. Writing/directing duo Logan George & Celine Held (who worked on three episodes of “Servant,” which likely led to M. Night Shyamalan producing this flick) were reportedly inspired by the real Caddo Lake, a place that has a dangerous energy that ties it back through generations of locals. They have imagined a story of three lost people in this deadly place that are tied in ways they could never imagine, and, again, I can’t spoil.
Paris (Dylan O’Brien, who can also be seen doing an ace Dan Aykroyd impression in “Saturday Night”) is haunted by the death of his mother, who had some sort of seizure while driving Paris, plunging them off a bridge. His survivor’s guilt haunts his body language, conveyed well by O’Brien as a man who is trying to figure out exactly what happened to his mom, even going as far as confronting her doctor in a parking lot to get answers. But he also suspects maybe there’s more to the event, something darker under the surface of Caddo Lake.
We also meet Ellie (Eliza Scanlen, so good in “Sharp Objects”), who longs for an absent father she’s never known and clashes with her mother, played by Lauren Ambrose, another tie to the underrated “Servant.” Her stepfather Daniel (Eric Lange) tries to mend clearly broken bridges, but Ellie is portrayed as a loner, someone whose only friend seems to be her 8-year-old stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk). After a family fight, Ellie races off into the lake and Anna follows, only to completely disappear off the face of the earth. Her disappearance will tie Ellie’s arc to Paris in a way that you couldn’t possibly predict if I gave you a hundred chances.
One of the reasons for that is that “Caddo Lake” is a relatively straightforward blue-collar drama for quite some time. In fact, Shyamalan’s name as a producer—and how genre-dominated this season is for streamers this time of year—is the main foreshadowing that something is going to go sideways. This doesn’t just go sideways. It goes in several directions at once, often in ways that are nearly impossible to follow, but it really comes down to how much you enjoy the challenge.
This viewer who sees way too many movies that telegraph their obvious plot twists from the first few minutes admires the narrative gamesmanship of “Caddo Lake,” even if I’m pretty sure I couldn’t explain it without a pen and paper to chart it out. Again, it helps greatly to have a cast who plays urgency instead of plot twists and O’Brien and Scanlen do precisely that, making these lost souls feel emotionally resonant even amid the relatively ridiculous machinations of how this story twists on itself. It’s too bad that the climax relies on Ellie doing a great deal of Googling to do the movie’s best to explain how everything ties together, but it’s forgivable for a flick that is best experienced cold, seeing this family saga tie itself in knots in a way that could only happen in those seemingly unstable places in the world like Caddo Lake.
Premieres on Max on Thursday, October 10th.
