Caddo Lake Explained: The Story From Each Person’s Perspective

Caddo Lake is an excellent piece of cinema with multiple convoluted twists. The characters are great, and so is the chemistry. And at the end of it all, it’s a love story that brings a tear to the eye. Because of the entangled nature of the story, let’s go through the plot as each of the main characters experiences it. Here’s Caddo Lake, which is explained in the simplest way possible; spoilers ahead.

Remember, the time travel in Caddo Lake is the root of all the chaos that creates the complex Lang family tree. We are shown the events of 2022 and 2003 happening side by side. For most of the movie, it appears as if Paris and Ellie live in the same town simultaneously, but this isn’t true. A giveaway for this is the broken bridge Ellie passes regularly, which is functional when Paris crosses it. Who are the key characters, and how are they connected through time? What happens to each character by the end of the film? Let’s find out.

Caddo Lake Characters Timeline Diagram

The ending of Caddo Lake shows us that only Ellie is alive past the 2022 point among the three time travellers.

Caddo Lake explained from Cee’s perspective

 

Cee is one of the characters who doesn’t travel through time at all. She’s a woman who meets Paris in the 1990s and falls in love with him. When Paris’ mom dies, he becomes distant, and she moves to another city. In 2003, she comes home for her grandfather’s funeral and meets Paris again, and the two try to continue where they left off; they have sex.

Soon after, Paris goes missing, and Cee realizes he’s pregnant with his child. She names her child Ellie and continues to search for Paris till 2005. One day, Cee finds a young woman rummaging through her car. The two fight. Cee believes that Paris has eloped with his girl. Heartbroken, she stops her search for Paris.

Years go by, and Cee eventually marries a man named Daniel. The two of them have a child, Anna. Cee never tells Ellie about her father’s eloping. And this leads to a lot of arguments between the two. One day, after a fight, Ellie leaves the house, and Anna follows her and goes missing. Cee and Daniel start a desperate search with the help of the townsfolk.

They can’t find Anna anywhere. A few days after Anna’s disappearance, Cee and Daniel get carjacked by a stranger who’s a spitting image of her long-lost boyfriend, Paris. Later that day, a very confused Cee sees the news that this mysterious person drowned and died.

Ellie explains to Cee about the time portal and that Paris and Anna got lost in time and didn’t mean to leave them. She also tells Cee that the young girl Cee thought Paris eloped with was actually Ellie, who travelled back in time. The two reconcile.

Caddo Lake explained from Anna’s perspective

Here’s how the timeline affects the relationships between the characters. Anna is born to Cee and Daniel in 2016. She grows up looking up to her half-sister, Ellie. However, she constantly witnesses Ellie and their mom, Cee, fighting for all kinds of little things. On days of massive arguments, Ellie takes off and spends the night at her friend Claire’s place.

On one fateful day in 2022, when Ellie leaves the house on a boat, Anna tries to follow her on another boat, loses her way in the waters and enters a time portal. As she stumbles around, she hurts herself and goes unconscious.

When she wakes up, she realizes that she’s with a bunch of strangers who have tended to her wounds, and the year is 1952. While this is not shown in the film, Anna would have been traumatized because she was abruptly separated from her parents and is stuck in the past.

We can only assume she was in some foster care, but we know she attended school as there are records of her. Eventually, she meets and marries a man named Ben and has a child with him, Paris.

Being displaced from time, Anna would have periodic seizures every time the water level in the lake was low. Ultimately, in 1999, she’s driving with Paris and has a seizure as they go by the lake. The car crashes into the water, and she dies.

Caddo Lake explained from Paris’ perspective

The pressing question is – how does Paris’s fate intersect with Ellie’s and Anna’s? Paris is born in the yearly 1970s to Anna and Ben. He has a great relationship with his parents growing up and, in the 1990s, begins a relationship with a girl named Cee. The two are very close, but Anna’s death in 1999 makes Paris box himself up. He gets obsessed with the erratic nature of his mother’s seizures.

In 2003, on her trip back from Houston, Cee meets Paris, and the two rekindle their love and have sex. Unknown to both, Cee gets pregnant because of this. Paris correlates his mother’s seizures to the years of droughts. He discovers a void in the lake where he loses hearing and explores it. Unfortunately, he enters the time portal and gets lost in time.

In the portal, he finds an unconscious young girl. He picks her up, heads out of the woods for assistance, and accidentally arrives in 1952. He finds a group of people, hands the child to them, and heads back to the lake. At this point, Paris has no clue this little girl is his mom’s younger self.

Back at the lake, Paris finds himself in 2022. He uses Anna’s boat and gets detained. At the hospital, Paris realizes that the little girl he left in 1952 was his mother. He even finds his aged father and tries to tell him this. Paris makes a run for it and coincidentally hijacks Cee and Daniel’s car and heads to the lake. He desperately tries to get back to the time portal by jumping over the bridge into the water, but unfortunately, he drowns and dies.

Caddo Lake explained from Ellie’s perspective

Ellie is born to Cee in 2003 after Paris goes missing. She grows up with her single mother, who never tells her that Paris may have eloped with someone else. Ellie grows up believing that her dad disappeared and was never found. After a few years, her mom marries Daniel and has a kid with him, Anna. Ellie becomes estranged after this, as she doesn’t consider Daniel and his relatives her family.

In 2022, Ellie fights with her mom and leaves for her friend Claire’s place. The following day, she realizes that her half-sister Anna has gone missing and heads back on her boat home. Right then, the boat disappears.

The next day, Ellie goes to the lake on her own looking for Anna, enters the time portal accidentally and exits one day prior. She returns home to realize she’s in the past, her yesterday. She sees her past self return from Claire’s house. Ellie panics and steals past Ellie’s boat. Now we know how that boat went missing.

Ellie lands up in other times in 2022 until she finally tethers a rope and heads out one last time. This time, Ellie reaches 2005 and runs into a young Cee, creating an impression that Paris has eloped with her. Ellie heads back to the lake, follows the rope, and returns to 2022, three days after Anna disappeared.

Ellie goes over to her mom and sees her dad, Paris, dead in the news. She explains the time portal to her mother, and the two reconcile.

How did Ben and Daniel witness the events of Caddo Lake?

Ben and Daniel never travel through time.

Ben marries Anna, knowing nothing about her being from the future. After she dies, he moves on, and in 2003, his son, Paris, goes missing. He moves on again, and years later, when he’s on his death bed, alone in a hospital, Ben is visited by his son, who is the same age he was when he disappeared. Ben would die not understanding what happened. He would probably assume it was a dream or a hallucination. Poor chap!

Daniel marries Cee, a single mother, and has a child, Anna, with her. Years later, one day, Anna goes missing. Though Ellie tells Daniel that they were always family and that Anna is fine, Daniel would never see Anna ever again after that. It is a tragic ending for him. He loses one daughter but gains another in the form of Ellie.

Caddo Lake: The Pendant Necklace

The necklace is part of a Bootstrap Paradox. Meaning something that seemingly comes into existence and disappears within a Causal Loop caused by the Predestination Paradox.

The Predestination Paradox is an impossible situation created by time travel where the future predestines the past. Events of the future make the past happen, and the past makes the future happen in a Causal Loop.

• Anna reaches 1952 with one necklace.
• Anna passes on one necklace to Ben.
• Paris finds one necklace in the time portal (lake).
• Paris finds a second necklace at Ben’s house.
• Paris passes on two necklaces to Cee.
• Ellie takes one necklace from Cee’s car. Cee still has a second necklace.
  
• Ellie loses one necklace in the time portal (lake).
• Cee passes on one necklace to Anna.

The two necklaces in this Caddo Lake’s result from a twisted paradox. The necklaces have no beginning or end; they keep going in circles and exist only within the Causal Loop. How can this happen? Well, in reality, it can’t, but the fictional time travel in the film causes this paradox.

Caddo Lake: Wolves & Moths

Back in the 50s, the lake was dryland inhabited by wolves. As the lake formed, the wolves moved away or probably even died out. But because they were around the time portal, they travelled to 2022, and that’s how Ellie ended up seeing them. The same with the moths – they went extinct decades ago but travel to 2022 through the time portal.

And that’s that! What did you think of the plot and the characters of Caddo Lake? Have theories? Drop a comment below!