Stream it. David Robert Mitchell’s first film since 2018’s Under the Silver Lake takes a 1982 Michigan subdivision and drops it into the Cretaceous without ever bothering to explain how, and that one refusal is the difference between an homage and a rerun. The End of Oak Street borrows its silhouette from Jurassic Park so openly that Variety’s Owen Gleiberman jokes there have been seven Jurassic movies but it feels like 27, and that this one might as well be the 28th. He is not wrong about the family resemblance. He is wrong, a little, about what Mitchell does with it.
The craft choice worth lingering on is the dinosaurs themselves, specifically the decision to put feathers on them. The Hollywood Reporter describes the creatures as densely feathered, like emus raised near a nuclear reactor, which sounds like an insult until it becomes clear how deliberate it is. Three decades of paleontology have moved past Spielberg’s leathery reptiles, and Mitchell is the first director with Spielberg’s money behind him to catch up. IGN’s Clint Gage calls the creatures scary and campy in equal measure, and singles out a sequence built on exactly that tension: a memorably goofy photo op that turns, in the space of one cut, into a harrowing escape. Polygon counts a terrifying silent serpent as long as a train among the creature designs that actually pay off, a Titanoboa that other outlets describe moving like a sloth right up until it decides not to. Mitchell made a horror film once out of a figure that does nothing but walk toward you at a steady pace. The serpent works on that same patient logic, and it is the scariest thing in a movie that is otherwise mostly having fun.
Mitchell’s career to this point has been a study of the American subdivision as a haunted place with no literal monster in it. The Myth of the American Sleepover, made for about $50,000, watched teenagers drift through one overnight party. It Follows turned a cul-de-sac into a trap nobody could explain. Under the Silver Lake buried its paranoia under enough ambiguity that it sat as his last feature for eight years before Oak Street arrived. Oak Street is the first time Mitchell has been handed a budget large enough to put his monster on screen literally, and the mildly surprising part is how little else he changes: the block party, a first-act news broadcast about NASA and time anomalies that everyone ignores, kids left mostly unsupervised, all of it could have come from his cheaper films. The dinosaurs are new. The dread underneath them is the dread Mitchell has been filming since 2010, and it fits here more comfortably than it probably should.
The film is not without a wobble, and Gage names it precisely: “that sweetness borders on saccharine at times, feeling like an affectation that’s not totally earned.” Anne Hathaway, playing a mother secretly writing a novel about a housewife who leaves her family, is the reason the sentiment mostly survives anyway. Gage calls her “fiercely protective, but also frayed at the edges in all the right ways”, and that fraying does real work against a script that occasionally explains a feeling instead of showing it (Giacchino, for his part, is reported to do his best John Williams impression to match).
The number worth citing is 86% on Rotten Tomatoes from 348 reviews, with a consensus that calls the film “pulpy good fun carried off with a light touch and a sharp bite.” That score describes a split over homage versus rerun, not a verdict on competence. Mashable ran its review under the headline Imagine Jurassic Park but bleak and stupid, arguing the Amblin surface hides contempt for other people, since the family flees rather than helps its neighbors. Gleiberman, watching the same 99 minutes, calls it sometimes scary, more so than anything in the lumbering last few Jurassic sequels, and sometimes a hoot. Both critics are describing the same film. That gap says more about how tired the dinosaur blockbuster has become than it does about this particular entry.
None of that split kept the film out of theaters, exactly, it just kept it from staying there. It opened to $21 million from 3,446 venues against Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, took a B CinemaScore, and finished its run at $121.6 million worldwide on an $85 million budget), respectable without being a franchise. It lands on HBO Max on Friday, Nov. 13, which is a fair home for a film built on a specific joke: a 99-minute movie that never explains its own premise, because nobody in 1982 Flowervale would have believed the explanation either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oB9AxspVow
Anyone sorting the queue tonight could pair it with a very different handmade creature feature or lean into the week’s other soft verdict with the HBO Max ghost story that’s also worth a stream rather than a skip. Both will give a better sense of where this one sits on the spectrum of homage.
Anyone allergic to 1980s Spielberg pastiche, the soft light, the Giacchino score doing its best John Williams, the kids on bikes, should skip this one without guilt; the film wears its references as a costume and never apologizes for the fit. Everyone else, particularly anyone who has missed a blockbuster willing to trust its audience with an unanswered question, should stream The End of Oak Street this weekend. The wormhole goes unexplained, which is the best decision in the movie, and the one choice that separates it from the sequels it is so plainly borrowing from.
