- Directed by Logan George, Celine Held
- Written by Celine Held, Logan George
- Stars Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Caroline Falk
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrx_lZxzjbQ
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
We went into this pretty much blind, and it was more than either of us expected. It goes along with not too much out of the ordinary happening for a while, only some hints of weirdness, as we get to know the characters. Then things abruptly take a turn and stay wild from there on. We both really enjoyed it.
Spoilery Synopsis
A man and a woman wake up in an already-flooded car. He gets out, but she doesn’t. We see that they went over a bridge. Credits roll.
Today, Paris and his coworker, Zed, talk about how they keep finding stuff in the swamp due to low water levels. They are removing old pipes and junk for scrap. There’s an old, damaged dam being repaired, and it’s messing with the whole ecosystem; there’s a full-on drought. Paris and his father, Ben, are supposed to go to a funeral, but Paris doesn’t want to see “her” there, so he just drops off his father and leaves.
We cut to Ellie talking to Anna about Ellie’s annoying mother and where Caddo Lake got its name. They take a small boat out to deliver groceries to some people. They find a dead alligator; something bit it in half. Anna finds some dead moths that are supposed to be extinct. There’s also talk of wolf sightings, but there aren’t any of those there any more.
Paris talks to a doctor about his mother’s condition. His mother shouldn’t have been driving. She just had a seizure at a bad time was all, according to the doctor. When he gets home, he runs into Cee, whom he’d been hoping to avoid at the funeral. They walk over to a very-unfinished house and pretend to make pasta in the very open-air kitchen.
Later, Celeste throws a family dinner and talks to Ellie, her daughter. They talk about Ellie’s dad, who’s been missing for seven years. She needs his death certificate for college admissions. Her stepfather, Daniel, is a nice guy, but she clashes with him.
Paris apologizes to Cee about not appreciating her attention after his mom died; he was in a very bad place at the time. Paris’s dog, Wally, has been barking at the water a lot this week, and that’s not like him.
We cut to Ellie, whose boat hits something in the water and breaks the propeller. She and Paris and Wally hear something loud and boomy out there. Ellie sees wolves, supposedly impossible, but there they are.
That night, at her friend’s house, Ellie gets a call from Celeste that Anna’s gone missing. By the time she gets home, everyone is in a full panic. Someone has taken the boat that Ellie literally arrived in moments before.
Paris and Zed are working on removing more exposed pipes in the drought. They don’t know what these old pipes were for, but they’re good for scrap. Paris follows the pipe on dry land through the woods while Zed circles around in the boat. He traces them to an old abandoned oil pump, until he starts hearing weirdness and his hands shake. He catches up to the waiting Zed. Paris untangles some garbage from the boat propeller and finds the chain that Anna was wearing.
Paris talks to his dad Ben about his mother’s medical records– he’s still obsessing over her death and possible misdiagnosis. Ben does not approve, he’s thrown out all that stuff. His mother had a chain just like Anna’s – though he doesn’t know about the missing Anna. Now he has two of them. He takes Cee to where he found the necklace.
That night, they find Anna’s boat, but Anna and her life jacket are gone.
Celeste and Ellie argue over their treatment of Anna, and Celeste throws Ellie out of the car. They argue over whether Ellie’s father went missing or just left them.
Paris compared his experience on the swamp with his mother’s seizures; he thinks they may be related and it happens when the water is low. Cee thinks maybe those seizures are hereditary.
Ellie goes off searching alone, at night, and hides from other searchers. She crosses the weird “sound barrier” that Paris found earlier. She gets disoriented and loses her phone. She’s out there all night; in the morning, she flags down a fisherman and gets a ride home. When she gets home, everyone is freaking out about Anna, as if she’s just gone missing. She sees herself arriving on her boat outside. Her hands start to shake as she steals the boat while her past self goes into the house. That explains who took it from before.
Ellie and Paris both approach the same bridge, but for Ellie, the bridge looks broken down. Ellie hears Anna yelling and time-warps again; she finds Anna– but it’s not her Anna.
Paris walks through the time dilation, and for him, it’s night time– no, now it’s midday. He is very confused. He also finds Anna in the woods– injured and unconscious. Due to a lost tooth that hasn’t been lost yet, Ellie realizes that the Anna she found is from a month ago, just out in the swamp on her own. Ellie returns home with Anna a month ago, after a big fight, which is confusing for Ellie considering how angry her mom and stepdad are. That wasn’t this Ellie.
Paris, on the other hand, is much further back in time, and he sees the old dam being built. The booming noises they heard are explosions from controlled detonations during construction.
Paris learns that it’s 1952, and he hasn’t even been born yet. He leaves the little girl he found, Anna, with some men driving by in a truck who will get her medical care. 1952 was the year of the great drought; Paris had a chart of all the droughts. He realizes that maybe he can time travel back to when his mother died and fix things. He sees wolves and moths out in the woods.
Ellie learns much the same, and she uses a long rope to find her way through the maze of time periods. Paris finds her rope and follows it back to Anna’s boat. He takes her boat but soon runs into the police. That goes badly, and they send him to the hospital for questioning by the sheriff.
Ellie’s in 2005 now. She steals the necklace from Cee’s vehicle, they argue about it being Anna’s. Cee yells at Ellie for making her baby Ellie cry. Cee is actually a younger version of Celeste, and she’s putting up posters of Ellie’s missing father– Paris, missing since 2003. Paris’s mother is little Anna who traveled to 1952, grown up. Paris and Ellie have been in different time periods all along.
Paris can’t explain anything to the sheriff. He sees a news broadcast about 8-year-old Anna Bennet going missing just a few days ago. He knows who that is. He breaks loose and finds a room with his much older father on his deathbed. Ben hasn’t seen Paris in years, and it’s a big shock. In his getaway, Paris steals Celeste and Daniel’s car by chance, and she recognizes him as he drives off.
Ellie looks up Anna Lang and finds that she died in a traffic accident in 1999 – the scene we saw at the beginning which was Paris and his mother. She looks up Anna’s yearbook picture on the Internet and sees her there. She follows her whole story up to her obituary. It looks like she had a happy life with love and friends.
Paris drives his stolen car, pursued by the police and jumps off the dam to escape them. The police yell that the dam isn’t safe, and he watches it break – with a flood of water rushing toward him.
Ellie returns to the swamp, finds her rope, and follows it back to her time just in time. She watches as water starts flooding the woods, and the water stops the time dilation effect– the woods are normal now. She hears people calling for Anna and Ellie and gets picked up. Anna’s been gone three days. Daniel talks about a guy who stole Anna’s boat and their car. The guy killed himself jumping off the dam, and he looked just like Ellie’s father. Ellie tells Daniel that she knows Anna’s OK.
Paris is mentioned in the news as a drowned man with no id, and the authorities don’t know who he is. Celeste is watching it, and she knows. Ellie shows Celeste one of the missing person posters she grabbed from 2005. “He didn’t mean to leave us.”
Brian’s Commentary
We’re almost an hour in before we see that this is a time travel story, and what twisted story it is. We were a ways in before I realized that Cee and Celeste weren’t the same character, and then later, we find out that they are. That was both excellent and very confusing casting going on.
It’s more of a time-travel drama than horror, but it’s really awesome!
Kevin’s Commentary
So that was the reason that the actresses playing Cee and Celeste were chosen to look so much like each other. I went into this expecting a creature feature, and the half eaten crocodile early on was a red herring. It turned out to be so much more than I was expecting, and I thought it was great. Not horror, but I’d put it in my favorites of the year so far.