I’ll be honest, when I hear the phrase “straight to Max” in terms of an original movie, my expectations are not going to be terribly high. Netflix does this sort of thing in such volume that they are bound to get a few hits in there (Rebel Ridge! Hit Man!), but I don’t really expect the same for Max. Enter Caddo Lake.
Somehow, Caddo Lake has come out of nowhere to make it to my best films of 2024 list. I was looking for something to watch and stumbled across it, looked it up and saw it had solid reviews, an 81% critic score and an 83% audience score. That was enough for me and wow, I was impressed.
The film stars Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner, Taylor Swift’s All Too Well video) as a man who recently lost his mother and Eliza Scanlen (of the excellent Sharp Objects) as a women constantly fighting with her mother. In the small swamp-bound town, eight-year-old Anna goes missing and everything is thrown into total chaos as the search reveals…oddities happening within the lake itself. This is not your usual lost kid story, in other words.
At this point I essentially have to stop getting into detail. One of the most enjoyable things about Caddo Lake is truly not knowing what the hell is going on for half the film, even what type of film this actually is. The reveal is not saved for the end, rather about midway through, and even once you do understand what’s happening, that’s when things escalate quickly and by the end you have an exceptional, brilliant film that has seriously come out of nowhere. I was especially impressed with co-stars O’Brien and Scanlen, and Servant’s Lauren Ambrose is also excellent here. The nature of the film may not also make it a surprise that this was produced by none other than M. Night Shyamalan.
I would love to do a separate spoiler article discussing the film and especially its ending, but I will save that for another day. I really just want to recommend it as something to watch during what I would call a relative dead time in home streaming video at the moment. It actually reminds me of A Quiet Place: Day One, a film I had no expectations for that also ended up surprising me and becoming one of my favorites of the year. I hope Caddo Lake may do the same for you. Let me know what you think if you watch it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
