Caddo Lake is the 2024 mystery thriller written and directed by Celine Held and Logan George, produced by M. Night Shyamalan, and released on Max. It stars Dylan O'Brien as Paris, a recluse haunted by his mother's death in 2003, and Eliza Scanlen as Ellie, a young woman in 2022 searching for her missing eight-year-old stepsister Anna. The two never properly meet — and yet their lives overlap in ways that form the entire spine of the film.

It starts as a sweaty, True Detective-style missing-persons case and ends as a mind-bending puzzle where you practically need a whiteboard to figure out how anyone is related. And I mean that as a genuine compliment.

This is a stealth-genre ambush in the best way possible. Held and George shot on location at the real Caddo Lake, straddling the Texas-Louisiana border, and the claustrophobic bayou setting does enormous atmospheric work — Spanish moss, still water, a world that feels swollen and waterlogged with secrets. The film stays grounded for a remarkably long time. A missing child. A fractured family. A search party. And then it pulls the rug out from under you entirely: portions of the lake act as localised time-slips connecting 1952, 2003, and 2022, with the passage opening and closing depending on the water level.

What makes the swing work is that the film plays totally fair. The clues are meticulously planted from the opening stretch — including a bisected alligator that initially reads as grim set dressing and later makes tragic, horrifying sense once the rules of the lake click into place. Nothing in the back half is cheated. Every reveal is earned by something you already saw and dismissed.

Dylan O'Brien gives an intensely committed performance — the full "haunted swamp man" experience — and he anchors an insane final forty-five minutes that asks an enormous amount of him. It's arguably career-best work. Eliza Scanlen, meanwhile, holds down the film's emotional core with a quieter but equally vital performance. Between them, the film keeps a human pulse under all the temporal machinery.

And then there's the family tree. By the time the credits roll, it has folded in on itself so completely that the film becomes a dark, high-stakes version of the novelty song "I'm My Own Grandpa." Without spoiling every link in the chain: one character ends up occupying two wildly different branches of the same family tree simultaneously, and the film commits to it with a completely straight face. If you loved Netflix's Dark, or any tight, cyclical sci-fi thriller that refuses to talk down to its audience, this is exactly your kind of streaming gem.

The cons are real but manageable. The narrative whiplash in the final act is severe — the gear change from grounded mystery to full temporal puzzle-box will lose some viewers entirely — and there's a decent chance you'll need a post-movie Google search to completely untangle what you watched. I did, and I don't regret it.