Caddo Lake… not quite what I guessed it would be from the trailer, which probably made it a better film.
The trailer for this definitely caught my attention. Mainly because it really didn’t give anything away about the plot, but captured a distinct, tense, feeling. The movie more than delivered on that.
The trailer, due to how it was edited, also led me to think this was going to be a specific kind of movie. My thoughts on that were wrong, for the most part.
What we get here is a really solid story built around very well portrayed characters all dealing with trauma in their own way.
There is, indeed, some weird stuff that goes on, and that “weird” is quite core to the story as a whole, but it’s far from the most important thing if you’re actually following the character’s journeys.
The setting of this, Caddo Lake, is a real place in Texas and Louisiana. The arial shots of the lake in the film go a long way to establishing what a wild and interesting natural place it is. A place well suited to various folk tales and dark, unexplored places.
Any story told here would, invariably, have some “weird” component to it. Even if it was unintentional. It’s that unique of a location.
While the setting helps a lot, it’s the characters that really make this work. The performances from Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, and (though she has a little less screen time) Lauren Ambrose really sell the stress of everything going on in their lives. (It’s still a little weird seeing Ambrose playing someone’s mother… she’s still stuck in my head as being the same age as she was in Six Feet Under… and she’s younger than me… so now I feel old…)
If you’ve seen enough movies, especially ones with strange phenomenon as drivers of the plot, or pay attention to the details dropped in passing shots and things in the background (like radio and TV sound), you should be able to more or less figure out what’s going on by the midpoint of the film. You may not be surprised by “the twist” that happens.
But if you sit with these characters, if you let yourself connect with them in their grief (because this is definitely about grief and the strain it puts on families), you’ll feel a certain catharsis and bittersweet catharsis when the final credits roll.
Nothing ground breaking or amazing… but a solid film with solid performances and an interesting enough story arc throughout.
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