The End of Oak Street

David Robert Mitchell returns with a vapid creature feature

Despite the advents of visual effects in the 90s wowing us with the prospect of generating all kinds of environments and creatures alongside live actors, dinosaurs have not been exploited as much as you would think. The Jurassic Park movies have been a consistent presence, yet few others have played with the subject in any meaningful way. You’ve gotten the turgid Land of the Lost (2009), the mega-flop Dinosaur (2000) from Disney, or the Adam Driver, staid flick 65 (2023). The latest to try and use dinosaurs for a creature flick is David Robert Mitchell in The End of Oak Street (2026).

Taking place in a quiet American suburb in 1982, the Platt family is suffering from internal strife. Homemaker Denise (Anne Hathaway) longs for a greater ambition as a writer and feels suffocated by her evasive husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) who’s vapid optimism seems to be more of a wandering mind than a steadfast believer. Meanwhile, their teenage children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) watch along in fear of their family splitting. One night, amidst a thunderstorm, a flash of white light transports the entire neighborhood into prehistoric times with dinosaurs roaming the perfectly manicured lawns and devouring neighbors.

Robert Mitchell wrote The End of Oak Street from a completely original concept. You appreciate a singular creative force behind the story, not needing to be backed up by any previous IP. The premise is certainly a hook, feeling like the beginning of a Stephen King book. Robert Mitchell, however, takes great cinematic queues from the only director that has made a capable dinosaur flick: Steven Spielberg. The entire first act, setting up a fracturing family within 1980s suburbia, with bike-riding kids, feels almost like a copyright infringement, but is done with a reverence and adeptness so that it wafts nostalgic instead of plagiaristic.

With the dinosaur concept itself, Robert Mitchell has fun setting up his scenarios, but they sadly fall increasingly into cliched horror and creature-feature beats; enormous beasts capable of sneaking up on humans, characters making stupid decisions to place themselves in peril, happy moments of planning one’s future before a character death. Not much common sense is given to many of these scenarios, which is not so much a reflection of incompetent characters as it is lazy writing. It’s harder to have intelligent characters get into positions of danger and have to think their way out, than a hapless twelve-year-old abandon the safety of his home in the middle of the night to go and look for his lost dog in the midst of a dinosaur-infested jungle.

Robert Mitchell burst onto the scene as a filmmaker with his taut horror film It Follows (2014). He followed it up with the Lynchian Under the Silver Lake (2018), but has largely remained quiet since then. Nearly a decade later he delivers The End of Oak Street, which while original, feels more like a 1980s B-movie than the type of fare we were accustomed to from the American director. It disappoints the great build-up for the work that this visionary and ambitious director had been keeping in store.

The End of Oak Street is produced by J.J. Abrams, who himself has stayed on the sidelines for years, only directing Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019) in the last eleven years. Abrams garnered a great reputation of intriguing set-ups, from his breakout show Lost (2004-2010), to Cloverfield (2008) and even Super 8 (2011). The common thread running among his projects has been the lack of sticking the landing. All of the projects mentioned became notorious for having unsatisfactory endings. While, The End of Oak Street doesn’t garner the same frustration, it does feature a finale that inexplicably undercuts the character development of the entire movie. It, thus, ends up feeling like a cop-out from confronting difficult emotions, and instead delivers a saccharine Hollywood ending.

The film is an expensive mid-budget feature, with the cost of the film coming in at a reported $85 million. For that cost, the visual effects are largely winning, albeit you wonder if the 1980s setting is entirely necessary, as it does little to add to the story except for the cars. The dinosaurs are rendered convincingly and smartly kept hidden in many instances. However, there were noticeably poor location extension effects, where a prehistoric forest was purported to spread from our characters’ backyards, but you could very obviously tell where the plastic plants of the set ended, and the green screen began. Likewise, whenever a dinosaur got too near a human actor, the rendering contrasted poorly, especially given the scenes were shot in broad daylight, where such effects are notoriously harder to make. It should be commended, however, that the dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street have an accurate feathered depiction, as has become the accepted view amongst paleontologists. Kudos to the nerd producer who made sure to include that detail.

In the end, The End of Oak Street is a commendable attempt of placing a sizeable amount of money and some A-list stars behind a completely original concept. Sadly, the film never breaks away from its B-movie mold, and while some actors, like Hathaway, give it their all, it’s not enough to look past some shoddy writing and a noncommittal finale that glazes the few sharp edges that had showcased some sense of the bold filmmaker we all know is hiding within Robert Mitchell.  

6.0/10