Aahana Swrup
‘Caddo Lake,’ a Max mystery thriller film, follows two young individuals on a life-altering odyssey across the marshy center of the titular lake. Paris and Ellie, two residents in a lakeside town, find themselves investigating similar but vastly different mysteries revolving around Lake Caddo. Ellie, a high school student with a contentious family life, undertakes the responsibility to look for her missing eight-year-old step-sister, Anna. Meanwhile, Paris, who never got over his mother’s death, uncovers a connection between her and the lake, raising numerous more concerns.
Once the two protagonists venture out to the lake’s creek, inexplicable forces await them. Where one might expect the lake to harbor a more supernaturally driven mystery, the narrative seamlessly subverts tropes, introducing a time-traveling element into the story. Naturally, the film presents its own take on the conventional sci-fi plot device, inviting intrigue from the viewers. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Time Travel in Caddo Lake
‘Caddo Lake’ sports a mystery at the center of its namesake in-universe location from the beginning. However, it isn’t until Ellie spots Anna at the Found Herd Creek that the puzzle begins to piece together. Once Ellie finds the younger girl, she realizes something is gravely amiss with the situation. The day that Anna went missing, she lost one of her front teeth. However, when Ellie finds Anna, the kid still has all her teeth. Afterward, when the two sisters return home, Ellie realizes she has somehow stepped back in time to the past month. Thus, the truth emerges that Lake Caddo has a time-traveling mechanism to its center. Although the film never explicitly explains the intricacies of the lake’s time-traveling abilities, Ellie’s rope tether offers a viable simplification.
Since the lake branches out vastly across two states, it’s evident that the time-traveling abilities don’t run throughout the waters. Instead, it’s concentrated to a particular point near the Found Herd Creek. From that point, the creek sports different barriers extending outward in periodic intervals. Each barrier encapsulates a different time period. Therefore, if one walks through a certain barrier and exits the forest without interacting with the other barriers, they will stagger into a different year than the one they started out in. After Ellie realizes the lake’s reality, she showcases the same through her experiment with the rope tether.
Ellie ties the rope to a tree in the outer parts of the Creek and ventures further toward the center with the rope’s other end tied to her own torso. As a result, she’s able to cut a straight angle through the forest with the rope, passing each barrier while still remaining tethered to the outermost layer. Still, despite the non-consistent flow of time within the creek, time remains linear throughout the area, even if unconventionally so. As such, if one spent three days in the 2000s before returning to the 2020s, three days would have still passed in their original timeline.
2022: Ellie’s Timeline
2022, the year when Ellie’s narrative picks up, remains the story’s epicenter in many ways. Although the teenager has been having issues with her mother, Celeste, for years, their conflict has significantly elevated recently. For the same reason, Ellie has been staying over at a friend’s house for almost a month. Yet, even though she has issues with her mother and stepfather, Daniel, the teenager has a soft spot for her step-sister, Anna. Therefore, after Anna goes missing following a particularly awful fight between Ellie and Celeste, the teenager dedicates herself to finding her younger sister. Where the local authorities are too hesitant to send vessels out to the lake with its dwindling water levels, Ellie sails to the area all on her own.
Consequently, after snooping around the Creek, Ellie uncovers the lake’s secrets. During this time, she’s also momentarily pushed back in time by a month. Around the same time, Paris also enters this timeline—and dies in desperate attempts to return home. Likewise, after Ellie’s adventures in time throughout the show, her narrative returns to the year 2022. Thus, 2022 houses two of the most crucial points in the film as Anna’s disappearance jumpstarts the story, and Ellie’s return concludes it. As such, the era ends up bookending the story, perfectly encapsulating the circular nature of Paris and Ellie’s eclectic family history.
2003: Paris’ Timeline
Initially, the narrative gives the impression that Paris and Ellie exist within the same timeline, with their storylines simply unfolding in different directions. As such, when Paris undergoes his investigative journey into his mother’s past, it appears that the storyline is unraveling parallel to Ellie’s narrative. However, all along, Paris’ tale has actually been taking place almost two decades in the past. The young man lost his mother to a seizure-induced accident that drove their car into the lake. Although Paris was able to save himself in time, his efforts toward freeing his mother from the driver’s seat were futile.
Consequently, years after the event, Paris has been trying to figure out the origins behind her seizures, consistently displeased with the doctors’ analysis. Simultaneously, he’s juggling a fragile romance with Cee, a woman from Louisiana who is currently in town for her grandpa’s funeral. Thus, Cee wants Paris to give up on the wild goose chase for his mother’s past—especially after he starts connecting visibly nonexistent dots between her seizures and the lake. Nonetheless, Paris maintains a single-minded focus on his research.
Therefore, once Paris ventures into the forest, he ends up hurled in another time period. Unfortunately, the man never returns to the early 2000s, marking himself missing long enough for him to be announced legally dead. Ironically enough, while Paris never returns to this time period, Ellie made a small pitstop in the early 2000s. During this time, she runs into Cee—whose full name is actually Celeste. Thus, after coming across Celeste and her child, the teenager realizes that her father actually went missing from his timeline. While Cee believes Paris has abandoned her—even going as far as to assume teenager Ellie must be his mistress, Paris is actually stuck in another timeline on his way to facing his ultimate demise.
Additionally, Ellie also learns another unbelievable truth about her family’s past. In the 2000s, Cee had a necklace with a cancer star sign—identical to the one Anna had worn when she went missing. Therefore, as Cee reveals that the necklace was a gift from Paris and originally belonged to his mother, Ellie realizes that Anna has been the latter’s mother all along. The same also means Anna has been Ellie’s biological grandmother all along. As such, before leaving the timeline, Ellie makes one final detour to learn about Anna Lang, Paris’ mother and her own step-sister-turned-grandmother.
1952: Anna’s New Beginning
After Ellie’s fight with Celeste, the teenager storms out of the house to return to her friend’s place. Naturally, an agitated Anna tries to follow after her in her boat but ends up at the Found Herd Creek, the wondrous place where she had previously found unnaturally large moths. However, this time, the kid gets hurt at the Creek and passes out with no one around to help her back to her house. Even so, Paris accidentally stumbles across her after venturing into the Creek and coming across its time-travel portals/barriers. After finding Anna, Paris tries to get her out of the forest on instinct and unwittingly walks into the year 1952.
Once Paris leaves Anna to a farmer, he realizes the gravity of the situation and turns back around. Thus, he leaves Anna all alone in 1952. Unlike Ellie and Paris, Anna’s step back into the past wasn’t intentional or even consciously registered. For the same reason, she remains stuck in the past, unable to make it back home. Nonetheless, the girl manages to make peace with her new reality and goes on to chart a fulfilling life in the 1950s. Eventually, Anna marries Ben Lang and gives birth to Paris, starting the Bennett—Lang family that she was a part of as a kid. Due to her unnatural, out-of-time existence, the woman reacts badly to the lake—another out-of-time anomaly. Therefore, her seizures remain in tandem with the lake’s water levels until she ultimately faces her doom in the same lake in her old age in the year 1999.
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