'The End of Oak Street': A Car in Every Garage, a Dinosaur in Every Backyard

From the outset of his career, writer-director David Robert Mitchell has demonstrated an impressive ability to recontextualize varying genres and filmmaker trademarks with his own stylistic sensibilities.

His 2014 horror flick It Follows composites the tone of John Carpenter’s creeper outings – particularly Halloween (1978) – transforming the mundane uncanny of a suburban neighbourhood into an uncanny valley map of apocalyptic dread. In his follow-up film, Under the Silver Lake (2018), he pursued a much more free-range endeavor, which functions very well as a love letter to David Lynch. The film is a perfect companion piece to something like Mulholland Drive (2001), in which a paranoid lead stalks and obsesses around a conspiracy-driven LA. 

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Yet, neither film ever feels like a hollow exercise in imitation. Mitchell understands that the most interesting form of homage isn’t carbon copy of another filmmaker’s visual language, themes and character archetypes, but rather the straining of those influences through a personal filter whose end product is something truly refined.

Naturally, when it came time for the 2024 announcement of a new project – at the time titled Flowervale Street — with Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway set to star, it required no extra thought to label it as one of my most anticipated films. It was described simply as an “IMAX thrill ride,” before revealing its true nature as a science fiction dinosaur adventure. Promising stuff – but does it deliver?

The End of Oak Street is premised in the wake of a mysterious cosmic time portal which places  an entire middle-class suburb from the 1980s straight into the Jurassic period. The Platt family (led by new career-best performances from McGregor and Hathaway) must find a way to survive their new neighbors and, ultimately, find their way back to the present.

The film is just as effortless an amalgamation as past films, with the primary inspiration coming from the heightened visual and emotional landscapes of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movement under Amblin Entertainment. While the influence of dinosaur touchstones like Jurassic Park (1993) is impossible to miss, I found myself, for large portions of its runtime, reminiscing about Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982). It is in the way that Mitchell takes the familiar comforts of suburban life and warps them into something threatening and almost otherworldly that The End of Oak Street evokes an unseemly muse, manipulating all-American familial melodrama – such as marriage breakdown, money anxieties and generational tensions – and folding them into a much larger cosmic plot. 

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What could have easily come off as conventional and didactic interpersonal quips  instead become the film’s entire emotional engine; by being forced to work together to survive against the prehistoric new residents of Oak Street, the Platts essentially undergo a primal form of family therapy. It's something we’ve seen recently in the world of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place (2018), but I’d argue it's executed much more effectively here.

Mitchell conveys something strangely sincere that successfully hooks its audiences, using the absurdity of the premise to strip away all the petty distractions of everyday family life; when a dinosaur is charging through your backyard, domestic grievances suddenly feel a little less important. The clan is quite literally forced back together by the necessity of survival, turning the film’s grand science-fiction conceit into an unexpectedly intimate story about a family rediscovering how to function as one.

And yet, when it’s not doing the emotional, meaty family drama, it serves as a near-perfect textbook example of how to escalate and, furthermore, sustain a number of genuinely electrifying set pieces involving what people will come out to theaters to see: dinosaurs checking out their new, literal stomping grounds. Whether it’s a herd stampeding through picket fences, a gigantic predator tearing apart a two-car garage, or some prehistoric beast casually eating out of a demolished ice cream truck, Mitchell understands that half the fun of this premise is simply watching these enormous creatures occupy spaces that were never designed to accommodate them. 

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There’s an almost child-like glee to the way he stages these encounters, endlessly finding new ways to weaponize the familiar iconography of suburban America against its inhabitants. Every backyard, cul-de-sac, swimming pool and family sedan becomes another opportunity for some prehistoric intrusion, with each sequence seemingly one escalation away from shattering its lizard-brained anamorphic lenses. The sheer number of endorphins these moments activated in my monkey brain had me struggling to remember the last time I had this much uncomplicated fun watching a movie. Furthermore, it was just joyful to see a blockbuster like this back to see it occupy where it belongs, on a monolithic IMAX screen.

Major props are owed to Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, who, for my money, chew up the scenery and deliver career-best performances as the parents of the Platt family. Both are given so much more to work with than the obligatory “terrified parents”, instead getting to flex some genuine chemistry and sell the increasingly desperate circumstances of two people trying to rally the troops while the world around them fall apart. A line as simple as “God’s not going to let us die here” lands with an almost crushing sincerity, elevated by some gorgeous, intensely composed split-diopter shots. 

On top of that, there’s a heartbreaking interaction between the two of them as they argue over how exactly they’re going to get themselves out of this situation, with the conversation gradually shifting from practical problem-solving into two panicked adults essentially trying to convince each other they’re not doomed. It’s the small, emotionally grounded exchanges that make the larger spectacle work because, beneath all the dinosaurs and destruction, their characters genuinely feel like people with something to lose. Every subsequent set piece hits that much harder because you’re not just watching characters survive a dinosaur attack—you’re watching a family fight for their home.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Congratulations to Mitchell and company, who get to come out of 2026 having made some genuine movie magic in a film that I genuinely loved from front to back. It’s been an extremely long time since I’ve been this taken aback by a new genre release, and what’s even more remarkable is that it didn’t end up becoming a backdoor Cloverfield installment. In terms of heightened ’80s nostalgia sci-fi, Stranger Things has been found dead in a ditch.

-Jack