When it comes to dinosaurs, it’s inevitable that your film will resemble Jurassic Park. In The End of Oak Street, you can partially find that correspondence, but It Follows director David Robert Mitchell expands the story beyond just centering it around dinosaurs by incorporating elements like time travel and blending all these fantastical aspects with a family story. As a result, what emerges is both a nostalgic adventure reminiscent of 1980s cinema and a rather warm film built around family bonds.
The End of Oak Street tells the story of the Platt family (mother, father, two children, and their dog) living in a quiet American suburb in 1982. One night, they and their entire neighborhood are transported by a mysterious light millions of years into the past, to an era ruled by dinosaurs. Suddenly surrounded by prehistoric creatures, the family must confront their own internal problems—a couple on the brink of divorce and two children affected by the issues within the family—while trying to make sense of this extremely absurd situation they’re in. This family, which had begun drifting apart in their normal lives, is forced to hold on to one another again in order to survive.
Setting aside the Jurassic Park similarities, the film also strongly reminded me of Shyamalan’s Signs. The resemblance here comes less from the dinosaurs or the science-fiction elements and more from a family trapped in the middle of a large, hard-to-explain threat and trying to survive inside their own home. In Signs, too, we watched the impact of the major events happening around the family on its members and their relationships with one another, rather than the events themselves. In a similar way, The End of Oak Street doesn’t just use the dinosaurs as a threat; it places them at the center of a story that brings a family that has drifted apart back together again.
The humor the film employs while doing this is also quite natural. It doesn’t particularly try to be funny, yet it succeeds in having its characters say and do funny things within the natural flow of events. An ordinary suburban family suddenly transported millions of years into the past and coming face to face with dinosaurs is already an absurd situation in itself. Without overdoing it, the film creates entertaining moments through the characters’ reactions. In this respect, it also reminded me of the Amblin films of the 1980s; it makes room for the characters to discover themselves and each other within a large, fantastical adventure.
Moreover, the action elements the film possesses keep you inside it constantly, like a roller coaster. We’re talking about dinosaurs chasing people through a suburb; the scale the action reaches in this film is truly wild. Yet Mitchell doesn’t lose the family side of the film amid all this action. Setting aside the dinosaur attacks, the time travel, and the struggle for survival, the film’s real emotional core comes from this family growing closer to one another again thanks to what they experience. I think the best thing the film does is to build such a fantastical story on top of a very simple and familiar family issue.
As for the performances, Anne Hathaway delivers a performance far above my expectations. To be honest, I hadn’t been particularly eager to watch a film in which she plays the lead, but one of the best aspects of this film is her presence. Hathaway gives a performance capable of carrying both the character’s problems within the family and the film’s gradually escalating survival struggle, and frankly, I liked the film even more because of her.
Ewan McGregor, on the other hand, had recently said he was open to a second season of the Obi-Wan series. He seems quite eager about that and, because he can’t think about anything else, he wasn’t able to fully commit to his role and didn’t deliver a particularly good performance in this film. In other words, if there had been a sudden actor change in the first few minutes of the film and someone else had played his character, I don’t even think I would have noticed the difference.
In conclusion, The End of Oak Street is a very good adventure film that succeeds in transforming this entire fantastical world into a warm and entertaining family story without hiding behind the dinosaurs and time travel—full of nostalgia and a pleasure to watch.
