MOVIES

Caddo Lake Review: Lost In The Bayou

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.

Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button