Cinema Review: The End of Oak Street (2026)
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Written by David Robert Mitchell
Produced by: J. J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, David Robert Mitchell, Matt Jackson, Tommy Harper, etc.
Main cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella
Christian Convery, etc.
Cinematography by Michael Gioulakis
** CONTAINS SPOILERS **
David Robert Mitchell announced himself as a filmmaker to watch with the amazing It Follows (2014), one of the most original and unnerving American horror films of the last decade. Its relentless, shape-shifting entity, dreamlike suburban landscapes and wonderfully simple central conceit turned teenage sexuality and anxiety into something genuinely nightmarish. Four years later came the altogether stranger Under the Silver Lake (2018), a bizarre, labyrinthine Hollywood conspiracy thriller that seemed determined to disappear down every rabbit hole it could find. Now, after an eight-year absence from directing, Mitchell lands somewhere between those two extremes with The End of Oak Street (2026)— a wacky movie mash-up, certainly, but one pitched on considerably safer and more commercial ground: dinosaurs destroying the neighbourhood.
The premise is gloriously fun. It is the early 1980s and the Platt family — Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor) and their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — are already experiencing their own domestic extinction event when a mysterious cosmic phenomenon transports their suburban neighbourhood millions of years into the past. Suddenly the comfortable American cul-de-sac is surrounded by prehistoric vegetation and populated by creatures considerably less friendly than the people next door.
It is difficult not to think of Spielberg. Jurassic Park (1993) is the obvious reference, but there are also echoes of E.T. (1982), Poltergeist (1982) and the Amblin school of ordinary suburban families confronted by extraordinary events. Mitchell effectively reverses the Jurassic Park formula: instead of humans visiting the dinosaurs, the suburbs are dropped into their world. The result is part science fiction, part creature feature, part dysfunctional-family drama and part disaster movie — a cinematic pick-and-mix that rarely stops moving long enough for us to question how absurd the whole thing is.
And when the dinosaurs arrive, Mitchell has fun with them. These aren’t simply majestic CGI museum exhibits waiting for somebody to stare upwards in wonder. They are animals, predators and occasionally wrecking balls, turning driveways, kitchens, gardens and picket fences into prehistoric feeding grounds. There is something inherently amusing about seeing the reassuring iconography of American suburbia invaded by creatures that existed millions of years before the mortgage, the station wagon and the neighbourhood barbecue.
Michael Gioulakis’ cinematography gives Mitchell’s suburban apocalypse considerably more visual personality than the average effects-driven blockbuster, while Michael Giacchino’s score understands exactly when to embrace the grandeur and when to undercut it. Mitchell even deploys split-diopter compositions during comparatively mundane family conversations — an indication that, beneath the expensive dinosaur spectacle, the director of It Follows hasn’t entirely disappeared.
Hathaway and McGregor also prevent the human story from being completely trampled beneath giant reptilian feet. Denise and Greg’s marriage is already in trouble before prehistoric nature intervenes, giving the film a neat central joke: sometimes it takes being transported millions of years into the past and nearly eaten by dinosaurs to put your domestic problems into perspective. Hathaway is particularly good at giving Denise the necessary toughness without turning her into a generic action heroine, while McGregor brings warmth and vulnerability to Greg.
There are some surprisingly brutal moments too. Mitchell hasn’t forgotten his horror roots, and when the film wants its dinosaurs to be frightening rather than spectacular, they genuinely are. The neighbourhood becomes a hunting ground where screams, gunshots and sudden silences remind us that families in the surrounding houses are experiencing their own unseen horror stories. One major mid-film development is especially effective because Mitchell briefly allows us to believe that this apparently family-friendly adventure might be prepared to become something much nastier. Plus, I have to say that gigantic prehistoric snake is a seriously terrifying predator, especially when wrapped within the rooms and doorways of the house.
The later time-warp mechanics allow Mitchell to play with paradoxes, alternative outcomes and some intriguingly strange ideas, but they also provide the screenplay with convenient escape routes. The film constructs a wonderfully impossible situation and then becomes noticeably more generous toward its characters as it approaches the finishing line. That choice makes for an audience-friendly conclusion, but there is a tantalisingly darker version of this movie buried somewhere underneath — one in which Mitchell follows his premise to a more apocalyptic and cruel destination.
Still, the neat, wrapped up conclusion totally makes sense and Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams crowd-pleasing, commercial sensibility has clearly reined in Mitchell’s more risky storytelling approach. Overall, The End of Oak Street (2026) knows exactly what kind of Saturday-night movie it wants to be. It has movie stars, monsters, scares, humour, family melodrama, science-fiction, time travel and enormous prehistoric creatures smashing their way through suburbia. Sometimes cinema doesn’t need to reinvent the dinosaur, even though some conspiracy theorists believe dinosaurs never existed. But, that’s another film altogether.
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