Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery star in David Robert Mitchell’s family adventure.
Writer and director David Robert Michell creates a suburban neighborhood that calls to mind his previous features: The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), It Follows (2014), and Under the Silver Lake (2018).
In each of those films, he delineated very specific communities — deceptively placid suburban Michigan in the first two, an artsy neighborhood in Los Angeles in the third — and placed characters into those communities who were shaped by their surroundings.
The neighborhood in his latest film, The End of Oak Street, exists in a time and place that is not specified, though it appears to be somewhere in the Midwestern United States, by the nature of its foliage, and sometime in the 1980s, by the absence of digital devices and abundance of typewriters. (The year is not given until the final few minutes.)
It is a mostly Caucasian community, with a smattering of Asians and Black people, where families live in their own homes, children play in their yards, teens ride their bikes, fathers work all day, and mothers stay at home.
Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is one of those mothers. Her household includes her cheery husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), and their teenage children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), who recently turned 13 and remains devoted to his loyal dog Starbuck, no doubt named after the character in Battlestar Galactica (the original late 70s TV series) and not the coffee.
Denise is unusual in that she spends her days secretly writing a novel. Greg is unusual in that he moonlights as a pizza delivery driver. Aubrey is unusual in that she yearns to attend Cornell, though she knows that her family can’t afford it. Brian is unusual in that he is unusually annoying and prone to crying under emotional stress.
Denise must constantly deal with an annoying neighbor (P.J. Byrne) who constantly complains about something or other. Denise visits a kind elderly widow (Anne Gee Byrd) who gives her editorial advice about her novel. Denise is friends with an Asian librarian (Emily Kuroda) who gives her librarian advice about a strange plant that has bloomed in the elderly widow’s yard. Brian peeks at a new neighbor girl, Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis), before he is chased by a bully who is very, very mad at him for some reason.
Everything is fine and normal until one morning, the Platt family discovers that they and their neighborhood are somehow completely cut off from the rest of the world and now must fight dinosaurs together.
The first act of the film, which is divided between establishing the community that surrounds the Platt family and their terrifying discovery of their new surroundings, is absolutely terrific: staged and decorated efficiently, performed effectively, and bolstered by good visual effects.
In the second act, however, cracks begin to show as Mitchell labors to invent reasons for the family to leave the safety of their home, so that the threat of living in their very own Jurassic Park becomes even more menacing. The frenzied third act leans very hard into the preposterous situation, throwing every possible menace at the family as they become ever more desperate, leading to a series of outrageous moments that frequently made me LOL because I could not take them seriously.
And let’s not even talk about the ending until everyone has seen it.
Feeling very much like an unholy melding of a 1950s dinosaur movie set in 1980s suburbia, The End of Oak Street is utterly ridiculous, even if it is a ton of dumb fun, if you’re in the right mood for it.
The film is now playing throughout Dallas and Fort Worth. Visit the official site for locations, showtimes, and more information.
Dallas Film Now. 