When an 8-year-old girl mysteriously vanishes, a series of past deaths and disappearances start to link together, forever altering a broken family’s history. A film by Celine Held & Logan George, starring Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Diana Hopper, Caroline Falk, Sam Hennings, Eric Lange, and Lauren Ambrose.

Paris (Dylan O’Brien) survives a car accident when his mother experiences a seizure, causing their car to lose control and drive off a bridge into the river below. While Paris manages to free himself and surface after a failed attempt to unfasten his mother’s seatbelt, she doesn’t survive.

After finishing his work dredging the lake, Paris drops off his father Ben (Sam Hennings) at Billy’s funeral, where he spots his ex-girlfriend Cee, who has just returned to Caddo Lake from Houston for her grandfather’s funeral. However, Paris decides not to attend the funeral and immediately drives away.

Caddo Lake is located on the border of Texas and Louisiana, spanning approximately 25,400 acres (approximately 102,000,000 square meters). It is significant for its rich biodiversity, including one of the largest flooded cypress forests in the U.S., and serves as a crucial habitat for numerous species, including endangered ones like the alligator snapping turtle. The lake is also historically important, named after the Caddo Native Americans, and has been designated as a wetland of international significance under the Ramsar Convention.

Since the accident, Paris has become obsessed with finding answers about what triggered his mother’s seizure that day, especially since she hadn’t had one in six years. He drives to a local hospital and parks outside, waiting for Dr. Mitchell (Lance E. Nichols) to exit the building. When he ambushes Dr. Mitchell with questions, demanding answers, the doctor — though visibly displeased to see him — tries to convince Paris that nothing could have changed his mother’s fate. Despite Dr. Mitchell ruling the accident a tragic coincidence and insisting there’s still much about the brain that science doesn’t understand, Paris remains unconvinced.

After his ambush visit with Dr. Mitchell, Paris returns to his RV home where he finds Cee (Diana Hopper) waiting for him. Paris confides in her, apologizing for his behavior after the accident and expressing his guilt over his mother’s death, for which he feels responsible.

Teenage Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) attends a family dinner with her estranged mother Celeste (Lauren Ambrose), stepfather Daniel (Eric Lange), half-sister Anna (Caroline Falk), and their cousins. Her real motive, however, is to obtain Celeste’s signature and her father’s death certificate, which she claims the state requires for graduation – a matter she brings up to Celeste after dinner.

When Celeste suggests that Daniel could sign it since he basically raised her, Ellie insists the signature must come from someone with her real last name, implying it has to be Celeste. This upsets Celeste, who firmly tells Ellie that both she and Daniel will sign the document, adding that if anyone at school has a problem with it, she will be happy to talk to them.

While searching through Celeste’s belongings for her father’s death certificate in her parents’ bedroom, Ellie is shown a silver Cancer zodiac necklace by Anna, who found it in Celeste’s jewelry box. We learn that Anna’s biological mother lives in Florida, though Anna prefers staying in Caddo Lake. When Celeste catches Ellie going through her things, she becomes agitated and forces Ellie to leave. A saddened Anna begs Celeste to let her go with Ellie, but Celeste refuses. As Ellie prepares to leave by skiff, Daniel catches up to her, inviting her back for breakfast tomorrow. Ellie, however, ignores him and speeds away.

The film never clearly explains why Ellie harbors such hatred and shows such ingratitude toward Celeste and Daniel, despite them raising her, or why she blames her mother for her father’s disappearance (later declared a death), which happened many years ago when she was a baby and barely remembers anything about him. Her actions seem to lack logical motivation, existing mainly to drive the narrative forward.

That evening, both Ellie and Paris hear disturbing, indistinct rumbling and clanging sounds echoing across Caddo Lake from an unknown source. The two never share the same screen, suggesting they exist in different timelines. After the strange noises stop, Ellie spots a pack of light-gray wolves, a species long believed to be extinct in the area.

When Ellie tells her friend Claire (Jules Hilillo Fernandez) about the mysterious wolves appearing in at Found Herd, Claire mentions it is the same location where Anna found four-eyed moths, another species thought to be extinct from Caddo Lake.

The Four-eyed moth (Gluphisia truncorum), also known as the Four-spotted moth, primarily exists in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. It is commonly found in areas with suitable habitats. While it has a localized presence, the Four-eyed moth is not endangered and continues to thrive in its preferred habitats across these areas.

The next morning, Ellie races back to her parents’ house in her skiff after receiving devastating news: Anna is missing, along with their dinghy, and they need her skiff for the search. After docking and heading inside to give Daniel the keys, they discover the skiff has mysteriously vanished. Ellie becomes frustrated, unable to explain its disappearance or whether someone might have stolen it.

While helping Zed (Zedrick “Zed” Tinsley) unclog the boat’s motor that’s caught on something, Paris discovers a silver Cancer zodiac necklace tangled in it. He is puzzled – the necklace looks identical to the one his mother once owned.

Written and directed by Celine Held and Logan George, CADDO LAKE is a sci-fi drama thriller that centers around a girl who goes missing from her home, triggering a chain of events that forever changes the lives of her family.

While time travel paradoxes might feel like familiar territory, the film manages to craft an engaging narrative around this well-worn concept. Fans of the Netflix series DARK will notice similarities, though CADDO LAKE takes a more intimate approach, focusing on a single family’s journey rather than expanding into the broader community dynamics that characterized the German series.

Dylan O’Brien delivers a solid performance, as expected, although I cannot comprehend his character’s relentless pursuit of the truth behind his mother’s seemingly accidental death. What makes him so sure that if he can get to the bottom of it, he could somehow fix it? What drives this obsession? Is he seeking closure, harboring hopes of changing the past, or perhaps wrestling with fears that he might share his mother’s fate? Whatever his motivation, the harsh reality remains – none of these paths can bring her back. Why doesn’t he seem to care about his father?

The film’s pacing drags in the first half, with the filmmakers spending nearly an hour building up the mysterious atmosphere and dramatic tension. Yet during this time, they fail to provide believable motivations for the characters’ actions, making it difficult to connect with or root for any of them. The second half, however, takes a sharp turn when it reveals a time displacement phenomenon within Caddo Lake – one that automatically activates when water levels drop.

The film stumbles in certain areas, particularly in a pivotal scene where Celeste fails to recognize her own daughter’s face after an attack 15 years prior. I understand that Celeste did not know what her teenage daughter would look like at the time of the attack. It becomes especially puzzling that Celeste clearly remembers assaulting a woman whom she suspected was having an affair with her husband, yet does not remember her face. The later revelation that she recognizes Ellie’s facial scratches upon her return to the present timeline only adds to this confusion.

The silver Cancer zodiac necklace, positioned as a crucial link between characters, also raises unanswered questions. Its origins and significance remain frustratingly vague – who owned it first, and why is it seemingly unique within the community?

The dam depicted in Caddo Lake is based on a real structure. Caddo Lake has a history of dam constructions, with a significant dam completed in 1914 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to manage water levels. A new dam was built in 1971 to further control flooding and water supply in the region. However, there is no historical record of the actual dam at Caddo Lake collapsing. While the dam is real, its fictional collapse adds to the film’s tension and narrative complexity.

CADDO LAKE was released on Max on 10 October 2024.

In 1950, the population of Caddo Lake, Texas, was not specifically recorded as it is primarily a natural area rather than an incorporated municipality. As of 2024, the population around Caddo Lake remains sparse, with the area primarily serving as a recreational and ecological site rather than a residential community. The closest census-designated place is Uncertain, Texas, which has a small population of around 150 residents, located in Harrison County, at the western end of Caddo Lake.