The End of Oak Street Review: David Robert Mitchell Makes Fun, Forgettable Return

The End of Oak Street opens with a rollicking gusto, Michael Giacchino’s assured heavyweight score ripping us straight from the production cards into a 1982 suburban block party in Flowervale, Michigan, where the styles and aesthetics of the ‘70s still reign supreme in outfits, home decor, cars, you name it. From there, it’s Meet the Platts: Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise’s (Anne Hathaway) marriage is on the rocks, and their teen children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) can tell. But the kids have their own problems, like crushes and Jumanji-pilled bully bike chases. Until the Platts—and everyone else in a two-mile radius—suddenly share the same problem: their neighborhood has been inexplicably transported to the Mesozoic era, otherwise known as the Age of Dinosaurs, in a cross-epochal paranormal event.

The cookiecutter suburb of Flowervale has been cleanly removed from the now, as if God used a circle stencil to cut it out and place it in a Jurassic oven to bake, and there’s no escape. Jobs, crushes, yard work, cigarettes, marital woes, writing novels, annoying neighbors, and the other mundane conflicts of modern life immediately become moot (astutely, the only one that doesn’t is alcoholism). Life is now about one thing and one thing only: survival. Heavily outnumbered by giant people-eating birds, reptiles, and eel-snakes of all kinds, it doesn’t look promising for the Platts. What ensues is a nonstop chase brimming with blockbuster excitement, gruesome-yet-comedic kills, a whole host of lesser-seen and intricately imagined dinos, and stunning VFX that bring it all to life.

Depth of character is across-the-board lacking in the shadow of action sequences, but said sequences pop, and the director does not hold back on the creative kills. In the initial escape attempt, a bird’s eye shot of the Platts trying to drive away (only to be met continuously by 200-million-year-old jungle) depicts the death of at least 20 neighbors. It’s somehow horrifying and hilarious at the same time. We see feathered, winged raptors; Galapagan, Bowser-shelled turtles; subway-sized, eel-snake basilisks with a thousand razor-sharp knives for teeth; skinny, sharp-nosed T-Rexes with a furry fish fin of a spine. Among other things, it’s like a visit to the Field Museum. Regular DP Mike Gioulakis helms a pleasing if standard aesthetic that shines much more in the Jurassic Park-worthy VFX than the live-action footage actually captured on camera.

But in the face of lurking death, in the siloed concerns of suburbia, the film is far from thematically empty. The dense metaphor for being stuck in the suburbs—now paralleled as a literal, inescapable circle of inevitable, indiscriminate obliteration and suffocating existential despair—can hit hard. There’s a sense that the banal pattern of life that bred dishonesty, malaise, and self-destructive behavior among the Platts has taken on a physical form that, ironically, forces them out of it. And this isn’t The Ice Storm, the brilliant Ang Lee film that incisively asks its audience to reflect on what suburbia breeds. The theme is wisely portrayed with stakes that even people who live in and love the suburbs can get on board with. Let’s be honest: not wanting to get viciously murdered by dinosaurs is a universal, non-partisan issue. (The setting also doubles as a funny but oh-so-true storytelling device for how deeply we love our dogs, rain, shine, or dinosaur-death impending.)

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell has delivered a film that’s unabashedly Amblin but more J.J. Abrams-core Amblin, à la Super 8 (which was not only stylistically informed but also backed by Amblin and hands-on produced by Spielberg, the company’s founder). For better and worse, Oak Street feels as if it’s co-directed by Abrams, who produced under his Bad Robot outfit. For better, Abrams has proven he’s pretty damn good at his own iteration of big-budget Spielbergian adventure, and that’s certainly on display here. For worse, David Robert Mitchell had proven himself a relative renegade in the industry with his first two theatrically distributed, totally unalike features—It Follows and Under the Silver Lake—and one can’t help wondering why we’re suddenly getting something from him that’s so recognizably something else: Amblin, be it the Spielberg, Abrams, Goonies, or Jumanji brand. It seems obvious that Oak Street exists to capitalize on the Stranger Things craze and the abyssal hole it left in pop-culture cravings after it ended eight months ago. 

Mitchell adds some directorial flair that feels personal, like a nuclear family conversation shot almost entirely in split-diopter, as if to say “De Palma can be Amblin, too.” The pervasive grim tone that also ran through both of his prior films in different ways feels notably Mitchell, too; the filmmaker channeling tinges of Donnie Darko in the broken family focus wed with wormholes in suburbia and a bleak, dark humor. That sense of humor is nothing like what we get from Abrams or Spielberg. Both have this trait in their films but not typically one that leaves us laughing at things that would be devastating under any other hand. 

All that said, a bevy of questions linger after a fun, funny, relatively forgettable film ends: is this what Mitchell has been working on for eight years? Where has he been? Will he return with something more unique in the future? It Follows was an indie sensation. Under the Silver Lake was peculiarly buried by A24, despite being one of 2018’s best films. After nearly a decade of silence, he’s back with Oak Street, currently filming an It Follows sequel called They Follow, and apparently already in pre-production on a Jim Carrey fantasy adventure film, Evergreen Pines and the Fading Summer, which finds a middle-aged man at a bizarre overnight camp that involves a “mythical grey beast guarding a hidden treasure.”

Getting a movie made is an arduous undertaking, so maybe the past eight years have merely been the calm before the storm. Perhaps he’s been working on all of these projects simultaneously and we’re on the verge of a DRM renaissance. If Oak Street is the beginning, it’s an amusing if fleeting restart for the director.

The End of Oak Street opens on Friday, August 14.