'Caddo Lake' review: Muddled and confusing when it should be clear

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The sci-fi movie "Caddo Lake," from M. Night Shyamalan's production company, revolves around the eponymous lake on the border of Louisiana and Texas.

Teenager Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) lives in its vicinity, where her mother Celeste (Lauren Ambrose) shares a home with her stepfather Daniel (Eric Lange) and her eight-year-old stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk). One day, Anna disappears, sparking a major search.

Simultaneously, Paris (Dylan O'Brien), a young man who works dredging the lake, investigates the car accident that he survived but left his mother dead. 

There's a lot more to this, including twisty complications that are best left unrevealed. The picture is written and directed by the tandem of Celine Held and Logan George.

MY SAY "Caddo Lake" is one of those movies that's best understood as a giant puzzle. It's a collection of elliptical moments and convoluted threads that don't play as much until they find their way together to complete the big picture.

Because it's so hard to comprehend what the narrative is doing, the success of the film depends on the journey toward the destination being worth the commitment.

Certain areas help in this regard: There's a strong sense of place throughout "Caddo Lake," enhanced by atmospheric cinematography. The lake looms large over these characters and seems to contain within it a universe of mysteries. 

Scanlen makes for a compelling figure as she searches for her stepsister, never letting the sharp turns of the plot get in the way of her personal story. Within Ellie, she captures the universal teenage sense of longing to be somewhere, anywhere else, to break free from your childhood and all that it represents and to find your place in the world.

But the movie is muddled and confusing when it should be clear. It takes far too long to connect the dots and to help the audience get even the slightest hint of what's really happening and why. That moment only really arrives with about a half hour left in the picture. And the road to getting there is filled with frustration.

Some of that is because the filmmakers have no real idea of what to do with O'Brien's Paris. The aim seems to be for him to represent a sort of familiar Southern grittiness, but this translates as the character mumbling and looking sad and trudging around the lake. The air gets sucked out of the picture whenever it cuts to him.

While treading carefully to avoid spoilers, suffice it to also say that when the plot finally sets in and we're allowed to make sense of things, the general response the movie evokes is more along the lines of "huh, that's interesting," than, say, vintage Shyamalan.

"Caddo Lake" is your classic case of a movie that would have been better served as an episode of an anthology TV series, where economic storytelling would've been required and all of the excess could've been trimmed.

BOTTOM LINE There's enough plot for about 30 or 45 minutes, stretched to feature film length.