The End of Oak Street: gripping dino survival film feels Spielbergian but plays against expectations

Ever since the first attempts to realise extinct animals on film – Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and Willis H. O’Brien’s The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915) – the trick has not just been to bring dinosaurs to life but to have them share the screen with human beings. Cartoon Gertie interacted with a narrator-lecturer and O’Brien’s stop-motion dinosaur is contemporary with cavemen (the often mocked ‘Flintstones’ model of prehistory). Outside of anthropomorphised animal cartoons (The Land Before Time, 1988), dinosaurs in their own time period aren’t felt to be enough to sustain a movie. Humans need to be in the picture for scale, for suspense and as screaming dino-snacks.

A succession of contrivances for bringing dinosaurs and humans together has come and gone – ‘lost worlds’ where ancient monsters never died out discovered by explorers (The Lost World, 1925; King Kong, 1933), sleeping beasts revived by atomic testing (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1953; Gojira/Godzilla, 1954) and genetic engineering (Jurassic Park, 1993; Carnosaur, 1993). Timewarps have featured occasionally, most recently in the Australian Vietnam War movie Primitive War (2025). This shares with The End of Oak Street a millennial palaeontological revisionism which allows for shaggy-feathered dinosaurs with avian mannerisms. It’s odd that both films are set before the idea of bird-like dinosaurs became widely accepted, but no one in either exclaims that these dinosaurs don’t look like the ones in the movies and illustrations they know – even though teenager Brian Platt (Christian Convery) digs up a book about dinosaurs for comparison with the creatures rampaging through his neighbourhood. With the Spielberg-initiated Jurassic franchise flagging, The End of Oak Street takes up the terror-by-beast genre and stages taut, often shocking sequences in which cunning, cruel creatures pick off unwary Americans. Core characters, comic relief, children – all eaten. In line with an unwritten but inviolable rule, however, Starbuck, the family dog, won’t be a casualty, and indeed has a heroic set-piece.

Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, of It Follows (2014) and Under the Silver Lake (2018), and produced by J.J. Abrams, whose reverence for the Spielberg-dominated fantasies of the 1980s has been well in evidence, the film has something of the feel of Spielberg’s collaboration with horror master Tobe Hooper on Poltergeist (1982), a film that would be in cinemas the summer Oak Street disappears. We get a sitcom tour of the ostensibly nice neighbourhood, where bullies on bikes are out for revenge against Brian, and the idyll (“You’ve got a great family,” a neighbour tells Greg) is only on the surface. The laid-off breadwinner Greg (Ewan McGregor) is a secret drinker, and supercompetent mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) has written a novel about wanting to escape clinging dependents and reinvent herself in New York. Slipped in almost subliminally are other against-expectations elements: Brian’s ‘new girl on the street’ crush Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis) turns out to be more taken with his Carl Sagan-fan sister Audrey (Maisy Stella) than the boy. An apparent happy ending opens up a can of wormholes.

Mitchell, like Hooper, is a guest in this Spielbergian burb, where a Michael Giacchino score subs for John Williams, neighbour squabbles are running jokes and characters do their best not to think about underlying existential despair. The protagonists of Mitchell’s earlier films were caught up in the weirdness but the Platts do their best to barricade the doors and windows and suppress troubling thoughts about fate, predestination, God and the multiverse. They have enough to worry about with giant snakes slithering out of backyard paddling pools, lumbering hordes of stegosaurs fleeing a wildfire, flying monsters tag-teaming victims and the general uselessness of their preferred weapons – Mom is a crack shot with a rifle, while Brian is an archer who always misses. Only science fan Audrey’s direct approach – stabbing an arrow into a raptor’s eye – has any effect. In fact, only Audrey has any scientific curiosity – she’s also the heart of the film, rather than the token-girl-in-the-Goonies type endemic to the movies this film evokes. The film espouses bedrock values but not the selfishness that is too often a feature of my-family-must-survive pictures: Denise’s most heroic moment isn’t defending her kids but welcoming the orphaned Jeannette into the group who must be saved.

► The End of Oak Street is in UK cinemas today.