Caddo Lake (2024)

Watched 10/14/24 (MAX)

It has been a while since I’ve seen a streaming movie with as little fat as Caddo Lake, the new Shyamalan-produced MAX thriller. It’s tight and focused, with subtle, believable performances and a cool, moody daylight directing job. It won’t blow you away, despite its best efforts. But it also never overstays its welcome and avoids some of the more flamboyant mistakes that lesser Shyamalan movies have often stumbled through.

To reiterate, Caddo Lake is produced by M Night Shyamalan. It is not directed or written by the twist master himself, but it does have clear influence from his body of work and tendencies for wtf moments. There are some pretty creative, jarring revelations in the back half of the movie, but they’re played very straight. Unlike those of M Night-directed movies, the characters in Caddo Lake actually behave like real human beings, despite the craziness surrounding them. It’s a bit surface-level and often moves at a breakneck pace that feels a bit more YA fiction than mature, patient adult thriller, but the merciful runtime behooves the story and it’s all well-performed enough to warrant a watch.

Caddo Lake is set somewhere in the southern United States, in and around, you guessed it, a lake. More like a swamp. Dylan O’Brien of Maze Runner mini-fame navigates a maze of water, gators, and [SPOILERS] to piece together a family puzzle while co-star Eliza Scanlen does the same for her family, which has recently had a child go missing. How these two stories intersect probably isn’t on your bingo board, but by the end of it you’ll probably at least be somewhat impressed with the novelty of it all. It’s not that it’s wholly original, but it fits together fairly well despite some rushed exposition detective work in the third act.

While Caddo Lake never really wraps up grandly, and never has much character work outside a few generic beats by its two leads, it’s probably worth a watch if you get in the right mood. And by that I mean that one should probably consume alcohol or beer before firing this up. The eerie mood and backdrop are handled well by the film’s first-time movie directors and you don’t feel like you’re over-waiting for underwhelming twists. The film could blow your mind if you’ve hit that point in the night or, like me, you could watch it stone-cold sober and be mildly entertained by what ultimately feels like a near-YA Stephen King-adjacent short story-turned streaming whatsit. It’s not bad at all, I just highly doubt we’ll be taking trips to Caddo Lake beyond this year.

5.5/10