Forget Stephen King and Will Smith, apparently the key to streaming stardom on Max is rural time travel

It’s easy to forget given how far removed we mere mortals are from the process, but it is well and truly amazing that movies consistently get made. Indeed, the countless names that fly by our faces upon the roll of the credits are a mere glimpse of the coordination, teamwork, and utter technical grit that went into making the corresponding movie happen.

What’s fascinating about this is that, unless your name is Christopher Nolan, the behind-the-scenes complexities of a film tend to be inversely proportional to the depth of the material it plays upon. Consider, if you will, the scripts that tend to populate billion-dollar franchise films, and then consider the script of a film like Caddo Lake, the low-key fantasy thriller that’s been doing some big numbers on Max for some time now.

Per FlixPatrol, this day of Oct. 18 has seen Caddo Lake stand tall at the top of the worldwide Top 10 film charts on Max, barely holding the line against ‘Salem’s Lot — its platform sibling and latest weak link in the Stephen King adaptation chain — and box office juggernaut/aforementioned franchise romp starring Will Smith, Bad Boys: Ride or Die.

Produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Caddo Lake stars Dylan O’Brien (Saturday Night) as Paris, a young dam worker who’s grieving the death of his mother by hyper-focusing on the questions surrounding her death, and Eliza Scanlen (Little Women) as Ellie, a teenager who constantly lashes out at her mother and step-father, and who takes it upon herself to find her missing step-sister Anna. When the two discover an unthinkable anomaly at the center of their marshland home, their stories collide in an utterly mind-numbing manner.

Every sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast has their favorite time travel system. Caddo Lake, however, isn’t interested in reinventing the logistics of time travel, but rather in the storytelling possibilities that such a thing enables. Despite this refreshing mission statement, it’s dampened by a few key weaknesses that prevent the story from sticking the landing it deserved.

For one, the time travel hook (i.e. the single most crucial component of both Caddo Lake‘s narrative heft and subsequent audience engagement) comes into play much later than it should, which creates an effect akin to the first half of the film being played at half speed, and the second half of the film being played at double speed. Had the time travel hook been in play earlier, there would have been more space for the film to spread out its revelations, and subsequently pair them with deeper emotional reflections from both the characters and the audience.

Which leads to weakness number two: the film needed to be more interested in the more universal nuances of the story it was telling. It’s hard to dig into those without spoiling anything, but Caddo Lake sketches a profound portrait of the influences loved ones have on each other across time and across lifetimes, but holds back on coloring that sketch in.

Nevertheless, it remains an entirely satisfying, well-acted puzzle that writer-director duo Logan George and Celine Held ought to be proud of, and certainly one of the better uses of one’s time as far as the Max library is concerned (remember, this was once the destination site for Madame Web, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and Tarot).