Caddo Lake is extremely produced by M. Night Shyamalan, if you get what I’m saying

Caddo Lake, the latest genre thriller dumped on Max with little fanfare (did you see Salem’s Lot?), veers toward the realistic end of the sci-fi movie spectrum. Set in a town of pickup trucks and local markets, where a close-knit community is treading water in a system that’s not granting them any favors, Caddo Lake could easily be mistaken for a modern salt-of-the-earth drama. But as with The Babadook or a Stephen King crime story, an eldritch touch eventually warps the human story around this town.

An “executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan” card in the opening credit is absolutely a tipoff for Caddo Lake’s game: It’s a movie that hinges on [SPOILER ALERT]. But the twist hits hard.

When 8-year-old Anna vanishes near Caddo Lake (a real-life wetland bordering Louisiana and Texas), her family and friends spring into action to find her. As if this were the start of a Southern-baked season of Mare of Easttown, filmmaker duo Celine Held and Logan George are as interested in the ways a crime disrupts the locals’ lives as they are in the thrills of a potential manhunt. 

Anna’s older sister, Ellie (Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen), spirals in the search for answers. When we meet her, she’s already cracking from feuds with her single mother, Celeste (Lauren Ambrose), who won’t talk about Ellie’s out-of-the-picture father and is straining her relationships by drinking too much. But familial woes take a back seat to finding Anna, and Ellie ventures into the wooded marsh of Caddo Lake looking for answers. Held and George take full advantage of their on-location geography, saturating the screen with brown and greens as characters weave through a setting that, thanks to the towering bald cypress trees that burst through the lake, is almost naturally supernatural.

On another track is Paris, played by former Teen Wolf and Maze Runner heartthrob Dylan O’Brien in his most I-have-a-beard-now-which-means-I-am-a-convincing-sad-adult role yet. While Paris lives and works around Caddo Lake, most of his time is spent lost in the memory of an accident that sent him and his mother careening off a bridge. She didn’t survive, but Paris is convinced there’s more to what happened out there — and that answers may be lurking around Caddo Lake. 

For most of Caddo Lake, Held and George drift between the search for a missing girl and Paris’ hunt for answers, stories that eventually collide when [I WOULDN’T DARE, C’MON, WHO DO YOU THINK I AM]. The film is fairly restrained until the M. Night-style reveal, and the directors rely heavily on Scanlen and O’Brien’s emotionally charged performances to keep viewers glued to scenes of weepy breakdowns and frantic boat-riding.

Ambrose snaps any scene verging on melodrama into a raw burst of recognizable emotion, as she has since her Six Feet Under days (and has done for Shyamalan on Servant). She only gets a few scant scenes, but when Celeste is clashing with her daughter over the life she wishes she’d built, and self-flagellating over her failures, Caddo Lake is a honest down-on-your-luck people drama. Then, when Held and George pull back the curtain, it becomes a rewarding head-spinner. 

What a nice treat to see a movie with a fulfilling twist! When it all became clear, I sat up in my chair at home, turned to my loved one, and exclaimed “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!” The final 20 minutes sustained the excitement.

The trudging path to get to this moment in Caddo Lake is hard to recommend: It’s wandering, surface-level, and in spite of all the moments where the actors pop, it isn’t terribly fresh. But Held and George stick the landing on the movie’s magic trick, which punctuates the characters’ journey with catharsis. The real twist is, by the end, you actually give a damn about the drama of it all. Shyamalan got that with The Sixth Sense, and everyone gets it on Caddo Lake. 

Caddo Lake is streaming on Max now.