I Can’t Believe The End of Oak Street Exists

We never learn the precise location of the neighborhood in The End of Oak Street, a tangle of quiet streets and circular cul-de-sacs lined with two-story homes and lawns whose borders are only sometimes demarcated by fences and gates. The license plates on the boxy cars indicate we’re somewhere in Michigan, but the place might as well be labeled “Amblin, USA” for how much it’s grounded in the movies as it is any actual memory of the era. It’s 1982, and the world of the Platt family — mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), father Greg (Ewan McGregor), teenage Audrey (Maisy Stella), younger brother Brian (Christian Convery), and their dog, Starbuck — is meant to evoke a pang of nostalgia even if the closest you’ve ever gotten to experiencing anything like it is watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. At the block party in the opening scene, neighbors grill and gossip between breaks for limbo competitions and sack races, their kids freed to roam the streets in packs. When dinosaurs start tearing through this idyllic landscape not long after, chasing screaming suburbanites down the sidewalk and ripping the aluminum siding off houses to get at residents hiding within like so many McNuggets, it’s as satisfying as shoving a hand right into the center of a carefully iced cake.

I can’t fathom how The End of Oak Street actually exists, even if it is a perfect example of what the big studios should be doing right now — making original spectacles, ideally ones in which Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor. After getting small-scale attention for his lyrical debut The Myth of the American Sleepover in 2010 then making an indie-horror landmark with It Follows in 2014, filmmaker David Robert Mitchelll directed the terrific, tragically unloved shaggy conspiracy comedy Under the Silver Lake in 2018 and ended up in movie jail for a few years. That he’d emerge with a Spielberg pastiche that’s both better than the one his producer J.J. Abrams made back in 2011 and more compelling than the actual Spielberg motion picture that preceded it this summer is a twist I didn’t see coming. The End of Oak Street slams Jurassic Park into Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in doing so manages to be an audacious good time that also pokes at what this VHS-box version of Americana represents, and how it relates to consecration of the nuclear family.

Because all is not perfect for the Platts, despite the context in which they’re introduced. Greg hides booze around the house and has been spending his spare hours delivering pizzas for a local restaurant, a side gig he unconvincingly insists is just a way to pick up extra cash. Denise has also been keeping secrets, chiefly about the manuscript for a novel she’s been banging out on a typewriter in the basement, one that happens to be about a woman who fantasizes about leaving her family behind for life in New York. Brian recently broke another kid’s arm, only half by accident, while Audrey appears to be struggling with some unarticulated feelings for her oblivious bestie. Then, after a series of eerie harbingers, the Platts discover the power and water in the house have shut off in the aftermath of an intense storm, and the atmosphere outside has turned unsettling and oddly tropical. Oak Street and its environs have, it turns out, been transported back to a prehistoric era, the whole neighborhood lifted out of the present as though with a giant ice-cream scoop and sent back in time to a period filled with massive predators who immediately start terrorizing the unprepared residents.

The way that Mitchell rolls out this reveal, which the audience is aware of long before any of the characters, is a real scream. Each of the Platts on their own knows that something’s off but is unaware that the swaddled safeness of their lives is no more and that they’re now easy prey. The most terrifying shots in It Follows weren’t about jump scares, but about the monster inexorably stalking toward characters who hadn’t seen it yet. You wouldn’t think a movie could pull off the same trick with lumbering beasties, but The End of Oak Street does, more than once, including an incredible sequence with some snake or legless salamander ancestor whose face remains winningly impassive as it slides silently along in its attempts to eat people. Mitchell is genuinely thrilled about the possibilities of space in the frame — he uses split-diopter shots like someone who’s only just encountered the tech — but the glee he takes in the carnage he inflicts on this stretch of suburbia is infectious. The movie, whose gravitational center is Denise and her quiet frustrations, is aware of the fundamental absurdities of putting domestic dramas on the same level as dinosaur attacks, even as it clears space for its two adults to have a long-delayed fight about all the things they don’t talk about while the world crumbles around them. In the havoc it wreaks on one of our most hackneyed shorthands for the American Dream, Mitchell’s film suggests that it takes a freak incident of time travel to save its characters from the prison of patriarchal expectations, and that sometimes you have to blow the whole block up to figure out if you want to stay together — primeval invaders and all.

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