Caddo Lake ending explained: How does the complex family tree come together with time travel? 

Max's thriller film Caddo Lake charts a riveting story full of mystery, intricasies of time travel and complex familial relations. The story follows two protagonists, Ellie and Paris, who are on different missions that ultimately brings them to the same place.

Paris lost his mother to a tragic accident and is determined to make sense of her inexplicable illness that connects to her accident. Meanwhile, Ellie, who comes from a tumultuous family life, launches a search for her her step-sister, Anna, who had apparently ventured out to find Ellie but ended up disappearing.

Somehow, as Ellie retraces her sister’s steps and Paris retraces his mother’s, the duo find themselves lured into the thick marshes of Caddo Lake, which is the centre of all the disappearances and the place where they will both find answers.

Note: The article contains spoilers.

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Caddo Lake opens the story with a mysterious disappearance

Anna is Ellie's eight-year-old step-sister who goes missing, and everyone assumes that she tried to follow Ellie out on the lake to her friend Claire's house and must have gotten lost. Anna's disappearance sets the events of the film into motion.

Caddo Lake slowly reveals how Anna's disappearance is connected with the creation of a rift in time deep in the flooded cypress forest. Amidst the forest, there's a section of trees there that can transport people backward and forward in time between the 2020s, 1990s and 1950s. Ellie and Anna are initially from 2022 but when Anna gets lost, she goes back in time, landing in the 1950s.

Paris' storyline is set in the 1990s, when he stumbles upon the strange patch of trees in Caddo Lake, only to find himself travelling back to 1952. There, he finds Anna passed out in the woods with an injury and takes her to get help. He realizes that he went back in time and believes that now he can figure out what really happened to his mother and why she died after multiple seizures.

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How are Anna, Paris and Ellie related in Caddo Lake?

In a complicated twist, it's revealed that Anna is Paris' mother. When Paris left her back in 1952, he was ensuring, without knowing, his own existence.

Another twist is that Paris is Ellie's father who Celeste believed had abandoned her and her daughter Ellie. But he had actually disappeared due to time travel. So the woman Paris was with during the first half of the movie was a younger version of Ellie's mother, Celeste. That means Anna is both Ellie's half-sister and her grandmother.

At one point while jumping times looking for her step-sister, Ellie ends up in the 1990s and comes face-to-face with her young mom who's carrying Ellie herself as an infant.

While jumping time, Paris inadvertently makes himself a suspect in Anna's disappearance and has to run from the police, which ultimately leads to his death when he's forced to jump off a bridge with handcuffs on, and he drowns.

Celeste always believed that Paris had abandoned her and baby Ellie, but when she sees him in 2022, which should obviously be impossible, she's left confused. But later that night, Celeste sees the broadcast reporting that Paris drowned in the water.

Meanwhile, Ellie, who has been investigating the disappearances, figures out the truth regarding her connection to Anna and Paris. She brings home a photo to show Celeste and reveal the whole thing, even though it appears bizarre.

Celeste now knows that Paris never wanted to abandon them and they realise that Anna will be fine despite the fact they can't get her back. When Paris dies, the connection in the woods is severed, and Ellie is no longer able to time-travel.

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Catch Max's latest psychological thriller Caddo Lake now streaming on the platform.