Caddo Lake Review: Lost In The Bayou

There are a lot of intriguing ingredients at work in "Caddo Lake," the new Max original film from writer/director team Celine Held and Logan George. It's got a dynamic cast led by Dylan O'Brien, Eliza Scanlen, and Lauren Ambrose, who played the adult version of Van in "Yellowjackets." It's got a picturesque and mysterious setting in the titular lake, a real stretch of bayou bordering Texas and Louisiana. It's also got lots of intriguing neo-noir ingredients, from missing persons and dark family ties to mysteries going back years.

Unfortunately, while these ingredients go well together on paper, "Caddo Lake" never quite melds into something worth savoring. It's a frustrating movie, one in which you can see all the moving parts and appreciate them as something worthwhile, but never quite see how those parts connect into a satisfying whole. It is, quite simply, a well-intentioned film that gets lost in the swampy wilderness of its own convoluted plotting and twisted character work, until all that's left is murky water.

The film picks up in Karnak, Texas and focuses on two seemingly unrelated families who are both dealing with issues. On one side, you've got Ellie (Eliza Scanlen), a young woman trying to make her own way in the world despite past domestic troubles with her difficult mother (Lauren Ambrose). On the other, there's Paris (Dylan O'Brien), a blue collar worker obsessed with the death of his mother years earlier — a death he still thinks is tied to certain problems no one seems willing to address.

Karnak, we learn pretty early on, is a place where a lot of things simply aren't talked about. The locals are more concerned with how a new dam project is going to impact their livelihoods than anything else. That all changes when Ellie's stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk) disappears one night, sending the community into desperation mode as they all search for the younger girl who hung on Ellie's every word. The more Ellie searches for Anna, and the more Paris searches for his own answers, the more it becomes clear that these stories have something in common, and it's all tied to Caddo Lake's history.

This sets up a mystery steeped in natural beauty and working class angst, all of it rooted in Paris and Ellie's respective anxieties. They're both trying to move on from a past that left them scarred, both trying to make a future in a world that seems determined to push them down, and Scanlen and O'Brien are so dialed into that narrative that we can't help but root for them. The mystery of Anna's disappearance only adds to this, giving Ellie something to latch on to that could create some force of redemption, while Paris tries to find something beyond constantly dwelling on his mother's death. In these early scenes, Held and George's script feels confident, natural, and assured, and their direction gives the whole affair an earthy, grounded feel. Then things get complicated, and the film never quite recovers.

We're not going to spoil the mysteries at the heart of "Caddo Lake" or get into great detail about the places the film goes to get those answers, but when they kick in, the movie reaches an inflection point. For a few minutes, at least, it's an intriguing direction, but the more the picture mires itself in the threads of its own story, the more it gets stuck, stranded in a swampy landscape where everything suddenly feels very frustrating.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with the ideas at work here. There are some very ambitious wrinkles in this plot, and when they're introduced, they make you lean forward and study the screen a little bit closer, eager to see the ripple effect. Here again, the performances also help to carry the piece, as Dylan O'Brien, Eliza Scanlen, and Lauren Ambrose all dig deeper into the messy, dangerous world of "Caddo Lake." Nobody phoned it in here, and that goes for post production, too: The editing is tight and the sound design is rich. At its best, "Caddo Lake" verges into trippy psychodrama territory as the characters must reckon with their discoveries, and you can't help but hang on what happens next.

The trouble is, what happens next not only doesn't work, but it doesn't even feel earned. All of the complicated emotional ties that resonate so clearly in the film's first half feel more contrived and harder to reconcile by the time we get to the awful ending. It's a film with a promising build up, full of well-acted character moments and ambitious plotting, that ends up landing with a kind of shrug that was clearly meant to be a bigger reveal than what actually hits us as an audience. All the good ingredients are still there, simmering under the surface, but they're so obscured by a film trying to be clever that they're almost entirely lost by the end.

And that's arguably the biggest problem with "Caddo Lake." It's not that it's a film that lacks talent, or that the talent involved lacks commitment. The talent is there, and the commitment is there, but the film runs them so deep into the ground by the end that you've almost forgotten all the promise of what came before. That makes it a frustrating, confusing, and overall disappointing experience. If you want something more satisfying, check out our list of the greatest mystery movies of all time.

"Caddo Lake" streams October 10 on Max.