‘I feel guilty about the accident…’
I’m all for a slow build, and I’m all for layered, labyrinthine plots that don’t fall into place until the resolution, but Caddo Lake goes beyond tension building and complex plotting into plain old confusing tedium. I must confess that I don’t get the hype on this one…
Caddo Lake presents us with two protagonists. Dylan O’Brien’s mumbling, troubled lake dredger and Eliza Scanlen’s constantly bewildered Ellie. Elsewhere, Caroline Falk is our missing Maguffin girl and Lauren Ambrose delivers the most compelling performance of the film as Ellie’s distant mother, Celeste.
Man, this film is annoying. It strains after Donnie Darko levels of profundity but ends up being stuck so far in the mud (both literally and metaphorically) that no amount of pretty visuals can save it. And there are some nice visual flourishes here, most of them because joint directors Celine Held and Logan George wisely chose to shoot on location and so there are some lovely shots of sunsets and boats and water and the like. Dear reader, I’m afraid it’s simply not enough. By the time the film whimpered to its preposterous conclusion I had long stopped caring about any of the characters and I audibly sighed when reading the quite ludicrous plot explanation after the credits rolled – only about 50% of which is made clear by the film itself.
Caddo Lake is a film in which the characters go on a deep emotional journey but they forget to take the viewer along with them – a missed opportunity and a waste of an undoubtedly talented cast.
