As if four Spielberg movies had been through a compacter, The End of Oak Street is a lot of entertainment packed, breathlessly, into a tight, tight space. As fancy wrapping – Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as the suburban couple discovering their neighbourhood has been transported into the realm of dinosaurs.
A bit Jurassic Park, you might say. A lot Jurassic Park, actually, and the Spielberg homage heaped up by director David Robert Mitchell, of It Follows fame, include chaste sexual traffic, everyday objects used to register epoch-altering moments – a variation on the ripple of water indicating impending dino-arrival in the original JP – and a general sense of awe and wonder. Plus a latent distrust of science and learning that plays right to the gallery.
Also really noticeable is characters that are sketched in just enough for the demands of the plot, thumbnail-style. McGregor’s Greg Platt is a needy man struggling to be the red-blooded breadwinner, father to his kids and hunk of spunk to his wife. Denise (Hathaway), meanwhile, is a would-be novelist secretly hammering away on her magnum opus in the cellar. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is a Carl Sagan-quoting science nerd, while son Brian (Christian Convery) is discovering the joys of smoking and girls.
It’s set in 1982 – when Spielberg was at his peak – in the burbs, where Mitchell opens with a neighbourhood street party so archetypal it’s a parody. Has anyone ever been congratulated on having a “great family”, the way Greg is in the film’s early moments? It’s all a set-up. After the cloying sweet comes the sour as the family wakes up the next day to discover the power is out and dinosaurs are crashing through the white picket.
A survival movie, a chase movie, with rational, planning-conscious Denise versus hope-and-a-prayer Greg illustrating different ways of problem-solving. If Denise eventually prevails, there are nuanced thoughts about knowledge, science and book-learning more generally to even things up. Again, very Spielberg.
It’s got way too much top end for what it is – no need for names as big as either Hathaway or McGregor. Literally anyone would do and it would work just as well.
Mitchell, as It Follows demonstrated, knows how to direct a genre movie. He understands pace and keeps things bouncing along, stopping every now and then for another Spielberg moment – like a space that no sane human would run into but someone does anyway. Or a kid with a puny bow and arrow attempting to kill a dinosaur. On top of that Mitchell knows how to build dread with creeping cameras whose point of view – subjective? objective? – can never be entirely taken as read.
The creatures are neither incidental, nor are they obsessed over. They are just there as a fact of life. In fact the most aggressive thing in this movie is tiger-mom Denise when her blood is up (I take it back about Hathaway – she’s good at this stuff).
As for the strange romantic subplots – two – do people really have time for this stuff when their lives are in danger? Makes you hope for the human race, if so.
Does it break new ground? Apart from the sight of two dinosaurs humping, no. It’s just a really well done movie that’s all about film-maker craft, skill and ingenuity – there are several set-piece stand-offs between man and beast that are genuinely intense. And if it gets just a touch breathless here and there, then that’s what it’s like being chased down familiar streets by giant scary reptiles while trying to engineer all those Raiders, ET, Jurassic-y bits into your movie.
The End of Oak Street – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
