The End of Oak Street (2026)

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street feels like a lost Spielberg film. There’s a two-year gap in Steven Spielberg’s filmography between 1941 (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and that’s the slot in which this most slavishly Spielbergian film since J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 belongs. It’s the space where Spielberg was reeling from his first commercial and critical failure–where he might have been taking stock of what it was that really worked about Jaws and Close Encounters of the First Kind. Mitchell’s film is essentially an amalgam of the pedal-to-the-floor set-piece structure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the suburban idealization of its follow-up, E.T.–the birth moment of a style so distinctive, it will be the first thing even non-cinephiles notice about this film. “I’ve been here before…” they will think. Collective cinematic hiraeth: if you were raised in this culture, this is the childhood you remember. Period-appropriate mom jeans and dad workout shorts with tube socks? Check. Squabbling tween siblings? Check, check. Suburban milieu patrolled by adorable dogs and kids on Schwinns? Man, you know that’s a Roger. There’s also a lovely moment early on where a young woman’s head is framed so perfectly by a lens flare (a quintessential Spielberg visual hallmark that works like an artist’s signature now) that she looks, appropriately, like a sacred Giotto illumination, complete with glorious harp arpeggios on the soundtrack. Many will call The End of Oak Street a spiritual sequel to Jurassic Park, but it’s more a Spielbergian take on Stephen King’s novella The Mist, except instead of fucked-up other-dimensional monsters, the beasties invading the aggressively WASPy middle-class enclave of the title are Late Cretaceous dinosaurs. It’s everything you’d want from a movie. Even my favourite dinosaur, Isaac from “The Love Boat”, makes a cameo on a television running in the background of a Spielberg™ family dinner scene.

But is The End of Oak Street good? Sure! Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are fighting a lot. Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) are worried this portends a divorce. Greg isn’t around enough and seems distracted when he is, while Denise is distant, secretly writing out her grievances in the form of a novel she keeps hidden in the basement. Bullied by the neighbourhood toughs, Brian takes solace in his misbehavin’ blue heeler, Starbuck. Audrey reads Carl Sagan, that most level-headed and aspirational of our homegrown philosophers (a perfect fit for Spielberg’s childlike wonder and optimism), and pines for a boy who barely notices she exists–or maybe she pines for her friend, because there’s something sapphic going on in the not-entirely-subtext there. Because this early-’80s-set film is a shrine to an Amblin past that subtly embraces the current world, Starbuck is likely named after the Dirk Benedict character from the Glen Larson “Battlestar Galactica” (for which Brian has a poster on his wall, briefly glimpsed), not the chief first mate of the Pequod or the union-busting PNW coffee chain. Also because this is the kind of movie it is, one night a bright light teleports the several acres of white flight into the prehistoric past, where various feathered dinosaurs start eating the neighbours.

I love writer-director David Robert Mitchell. Despite the addition of dinosaurs, The End of Oak Street feels of a piece with his work, evoking the sleepiness that hides desperation and loneliness in The Myth of the American Sleepover, the endless summer nights that thrum with mortality in It Follows, and Under the Silver Lake‘s looming threat of instant and permanent social upheaval. Note the various establishing shots depicting the characters as at once vulnerably exposed and pointedly alone. When the monsters appear, it is often from behind our heroes, It Follows-style: visible to us but undetected by them until it’s almost too late. Still, the frights in It Follows work the way they do because its sex demon is so fraught with interpretative possibilities. You’d think you couldn’t avoid metaphor when one of the creatures in your monster movie is a skyscraper-long white snake creeping its way through a cunning simulacrum of everyone’s childhood home, but it’s a loaded image left to fend largely for itself. Is this fantastic event–the teleportation back to inhospitable times–a commentary on marriage on the rocks? On the first round of the neoconservative/evangelical crusade under Reagan (remembering the Gipper’s campaign slogan was “Let’s make America Great Again”)? If The End of Oak Street were a dense sociopolitical text in addition to being a banger of an action flick, that’d be par for the proverbial course.

But it’s not. At least, not one I could decipher. Which is fine. This is a fun–if ultimately a touch repetitive–disaster movie cum creature feature with more than adequate performances and a Scholastic Books high-concept premise that nearly sustains a full feature. I couldn’t help thinking that, if this were a Spielberg film, there’d be a scene where Brian’s bike-riding pals descend on Oak Street like a John Ford cavalry charge. That Brian would share a sweet kiss with the new cutie on the block, a recent orphan whose guardians the picture treats with curious disinterest. That we’d see more awestruck faces beholding the majesty of herds of beasties stampeding a grid of McMansions and their carefully cultivated lawns. That there would have been a character who loves dinosaurs and is having a super time, all things considered, and they’d conveniently drop some dinosaur knowledge we would later observe unfolding before us like saurian Chekhov’s guns. I will say I appreciated the film’s gory sense of humour (a smear on a rooftop; a destined-to-be-legendary T-Rex attack), the choreography of a sprinting battle through a cul-de-sac with all hands playing a part, and Anne Hathaway wearing the most unflattering jeans there ever were (one of the funniest physical running gags I’ve seen in years). Yet the best scene in the movie is pure Mitchell: Audrey sitting alone in the family car at night. She pops in a cassette, and Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” starts playing. She sings along, crying quietly, and Mitchell lingers right up through “I’m the same boy I used to be” before cutting away. Nostalgia as melancholy: the exact distillation of teenage despair. Magic. Between this and a scene where Audrey holds eye contact for longer than she should while bandaging up a pretty girl’s leg, I could be persuaded that this is all a coming-out allegory for Stella’s character. There’s an awful lot to like about The End of Oak Street, is what I’m saying. I’ll probably see it again. I hope it makes the money Mitchell’s other films should have made. And I hope he spends it well.