Caddo Lake feels primordial. The cries of birds and other creatures unseen echo among the cypress trees draped in ragged Spanish moss that loom over glassy water. It is a place, in other words, that cannot help but inspire yarns, which locals in tiny towns with eerie names such as Uncertain are quick to tell wandering out-of-towners.
Lately, Caddo Lake has served as the setting for storytellers of the professional variety. The renowned Texan novelist Attica Locke set her 2019 crime thriller, Heaven, My Home, there. The book centers on the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy. Strangely, another thriller centering on a missing child arrives Thursday, this time on the small screen. Max’s film Caddo Lake, from producer M. Night Shyamalan and writer-directors Celine Held and Logan George, is not only set in Karnack, a small Texas town that abuts Caddo Lake State Park, but was also largely filmed there.
Held and George, who live in Brooklyn, wrote the story after spending two months by Caddo Lake, which spreads across the Texas-Louisiana border. In their tale, eight-year-old Anna (Caroline Falk) disappears into the lake’s thicket, and her stepsister, Ellie (Eliza Scanlen), goes searching for her.
Meanwhile, a young pipe fitter, Paris (Dylan O’Brien), who is wracked by guilt after he couldn’t save his mother from drowning in the ominous body of water, discovers something among the cypresses that leaves him seeking answers and redemption.
Caddo Lake has the hallmarks of Shyamalan’s best stories: inquisitive kids who have more to them than meets the eye, families broken by trauma that are eventually healed through a supernatural experience, and, of course, a mind-bending plot twist. But I came away with two somewhat opposing thoughts. The first was that the film felt longer than its run time of 1 hour and 40 minutes. The final 25 minutes come very close to justifying the story’s slow creep. A drumbeat of revelations and action makes for fun viewing after one wonders for a long while where, if anywhere, the story is going. But once the mystery of the lake is unlocked, as the film crescendos, the ending becomes surmisable and is somewhat drained of satisfaction.
My second thought was that this story had the kernel of a longer, more ambitious one. It has almost the exact same starting ingredients as one of the best series I’ve ever seen, Netflix’s Dark, which centers on—you guessed it—children disappearing from a small town (this one in Germany) and characters uncovering family secrets through supernatural experiences in a creepy forest.
Karnack and Caddo Lake would be the perfect setting for an American version of that show. This happens sometimes: A film that’s fine becomes a fantastic show—think M*A*S*H or, a bit more recently, Westworld. The logic of Caddo Lake’s supernatural element—and that element’s consequences for the characters and their town—would be better suited to episodic revelations than the crammed final act of a film. A Caddo Lake show that builds out an alternative Karnack full of secrets and the supernatural would make for a perfect pairing of setting and serialized story.
It’s the setting that ultimately makes the film worth watching. The lake itself is almost a character, and, like a great actor, it elevates the story and the performances of the other players, who turn in otherwise serviceable performances (and decent East Texas accents). The dark water and looming, ancient trees are at once gorgeous, terrifying, ethereal, claustrophobic, and mesmerizing. The lake is, in other words, what the movie hopes to be. But, like Anna, Caddo Lake gets a little lost somewhere along the way.
