I was a huge fan of It Follows, like so many. David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 breakout was lean, inventive, and genuinely unsettling. It was the kind of early career work that makes you want to follow a filmmaker for the rest of their career. So when his follow-up, Under the Silver Lake, landed him in “director jail,” it felt like an overreaction. I wasn’t a huge fan of that film either, if I’m honest. But I could see the creative and unique intent behind its shagginess, and the overwhelming success of It Follows had already cemented Mitchell as a director worth keeping an eye on.
Unfortunately, after The End of Oak Street, Mitchell is officially more “miss” than “hit” with me.
The film reunites the director with a starry cast and a considerably bigger budget than anything he’s touched before. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play Denise and Greg Platt, a married couple whose relationship is fraying in 1982 suburbia, right around the time Greg loses his job. Their teenage kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), deal with their own low-stakes problems — crushes, bullies, what have you — until the whole neighborhood is inexplicably transported to the Mesozoic era, where everyone’s problems become considerably higher-stakes.
When I saw the trailers, I kept wondering what the hidden trick up this film’s sleeve was. Surely this wouldn’t just be a straight-up nostalgic dinosaur adventure movie, given Mitchell’s previous efforts? The answer is somewhere between yes and no. Seventy percent of The End of Oak Street plays like a love letter to Jurassic Park and Spielberg at best, and a bad Jumanji clone at worst. It’s built from very familiar territory and does a pale impression of its predecessors.
Most of the difference between the striking original and pale copy comes down to character development and scripting. Hathaway’s character, arguably the film’s biggest strength, works only because of the sheer will and effort she puts into the part. On paper, Denise is kind of a nightmare: a mother who wants to abandon her family for reasons that never get clearly articulated beyond her embarrassment that her husband is now delivering pizzas. McGregor’s Greg is the reverse: more relatable on paper, but the performance (and it pains me to say this as an Ewan McGregor superfan) is incredibly thin. The two kids don’t get much in the way of arcs beyond running from dinosaurs, and although the film occasionally makes ponderous gestures toward heady topics like physics, God, and time, it can do little more than suggest those concepts exist while categorically refusing to engage with any of them in a real way.
So what does The End of Oak Street have going for it? Beyond Hathaway, who really is trying her best, the strongest parts of the film come in smatterings of random, unpredictable violence. It’s a wonder this thing is rated PG-13 given how abruptly, graphically, and bizarrely, humorously the residents of the neighborhood get picked off by feather-covered beasts. On that note, the dinosaur design is probably the second-best thing here: mostly middling CGI, but I appreciated that Mitchell went all-in on the feathered, bird-like look rather than defaulting to the scaly-lizard iconography we’ve seen a thousand times. The visuals are solid, and the bursts of tonal whiplash and violence were enough to keep me engaged. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still the minority of the runtime.
On the whole, The End of Oak Street feels like a lot of waiting around for the good part. A once-daring director playing it safe in someone else’s sandbox.