REVIEW: Caddo Lake [2024]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 99 minutes
Release Date: October 10th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: HBO Max
Director(s): Logan George & Celine Held
Writer(s): Logan George & Celine Held

I’m not related to any of these people.

**Potential spoiler—according to the studio**

Despite the studio classifying it as a spoiler, Celine Held and Logan George’s Caddo Lake’s time travel component is its structural foundation. They asked for critics to refrain from mentioning it pre-release—a stipulation that would have forced me to hold my thoughts until after it debuted if I wasn’t already scheduling it then anyway. Why? Because it’s an integral talking point. Admitting that doesn’t mean you should ruin the results of its impact. It simply allows you to speak on its necessary implications towards the characters’ baseline motivations.

Because it means absolutely everything to both Paris (Dylan O’Brien) and Ellie’s (Eliza Scanlen) actions throughout. He’s trying to find answers as to why his mother had seizures—a condition that led to her death via a car crash he was in too. She’s trying to find her missing stepsister (Caroline Falk’s Anna) a day after reminding her mother (Lauren Ambrose’s Celeste) and stepfather (Eric Lange’s Daniel) that they weren’t her real family. This desperation is what leads them to an area of Caddo Lake that should be underwater if not for the current drought. A place housing an unexplained phenomenon that pulls them through time.

Think of it like the drug in Benson and Moorhead’s Synchronic. You don’t know exactly where you’re going in time, but you will stay in the same geographic spot in space when you go. It’s disorienting at first, but both catch on quickly to realize they might be able to stop the tragic events currently driving them. If Ellie gets it right, she can prevent eight-year-old Anna from going out onto the water that night. If Paris gets it right, he can make sure to be driving the car the day his mother dies. We know quite early, however, that what’s “right” to them isn’t necessarily what’s right. It doesn’t mean their journeys won’t provide them what they need, though.

It’s easy to guess what’s happening at the start considering the ways in which Held and George purposefully keep these characters apart. This is also one of the reasons I wouldn’t consider “time travel” a spoiler since the filmmakers are never trying to hide it. In fact, they are using our desire to “figure it out” as a means to push us off the scent of how they’re utilizing it. Because the first act is very specifically drawn to make us assume a connection between Paris and Ellie that they can later subvert in the second. For all we know, they aren’t even from different times. Maybe they simply live on opposite ends of the lake.

To go into more detail would be giving away spoilers, so I’ll stop there. All you must know is that Held and George are meticulous. So, don’t go looking for plot holes. This is a closed loop with everything accounted for in the sense that time can never change. You’ve always gone back and done what you’ve done. The chicken is the egg. This film isn’t therefore about altering events as much as altering Paris and Ellie’s sense of self. By having the opportunity to go on this fast-paced adventure, they’re able to escape the limitations they’ve placed upon themselves as a result of their pasts. We so vehemently want our lives to make sense that we too often apply intent to moments that inevitably ensures we can’t move on.

O’Brien and Scanlen are therefore crucial to the film’s success because everything we see and feel is a product of their epiphanies. They want to save the people they lost so badly that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves in the process without asking whether that person would want them to do so. And what makes Caddo Lake so powerful is its ability to open their eyes to this fact without needing them to relive the nightmare. Because it’s not about showing them that they can’t do what it is they wish to accomplish. It’s about showing them that they might have already done it. This butterfly’s wings already flapped. Paris and Ellie are now merely able to see the results.

It makes for an extremely hopeful film despite the looming darkness brought on by past ghosts and present anger. By meeting these characters at their most jaded and closed off, there’s nowhere else to go but the clarity of healing. That doesn’t mean everything will work out for a happy ending. Just that the black cloud they’ve let consume them for too long might dissipate before their fate is sealed. It’s all convoluted enough to warrant the studio issuing an insane clarifying note so critics don’t get the wrong idea if they can’t quite wrap their heads around everything, but none of the hoops we jump through are without both narrative and emotional function.