There is nothing plausible about The End of Oak Street, and I mean that as a compliment. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell takes an ordinary 1982 suburban neighborhood, rips it from its familiar world via a mysterious cosmic event, and drops it into a prehistoric landscape filled with hungry dinosaurs. It is a completely ridiculous premise, but the movie seems to know that. It never asks us to take any of this too seriously, and that is exactly why I had such a good time with it.
Anne Hathaway plays suburban housewife Denise Platt, and Ewan McGregor is her husband, Greg, with Maisy Stella as their daughter Audrey and Christian Convery as their son Brian. Together, the Platts have to figure out how to survive once their quiet suburban life suddenly becomes considerably less quiet. Hathaway and McGregor are excellent leads, and I genuinely enjoyed seeing two such accomplished actors thrown into something this wonderfully strange. Stella brings warmth and intelligence to Audrey, while Convery gives Brian the nervous energy you would expect from a kid who suddenly discovers dinosaurs roaming the neighborhood.
The creatures are among the film’s greatest pleasures. They are wonderfully rendered, often frightening, and just unusual enough to feel different from the dinosaurs we have become accustomed to seeing onscreen. Most striking is the amount of feathering. Some of them look almost furry, which initially feels odd because movie audiences have been trained for years to expect dinosaurs to look primarily reptilian, with perhaps a few birdlike features. Here, the feathering is much more pronounced, particularly on the raptor-like creatures. While it may take a moment to adjust, it gives them a wonderfully scruffy, almost animalistic quality.
Mitchell also understands that once you have put dinosaurs in an American suburb, there is no reason to be timid. The movie keeps finding amusing and frightening ways to place prehistoric creatures in the most ordinary places: backyards, houses, and streets designed for station wagons and neighborhood barbecues rather than giant predators. The contrast is inherently silly, and the movie wisely embraces it rather than trying to explain every bit of its own logic.
There are some excellent twists and surprises along the way, and I am not going to spoil them because discovering just how strange the story is willing to become is part of the fun. What begins as a fairly straightforward survival story eventually takes unexpected turns, and I appreciated that the movie did not simply settle for 99 minutes of people running from dinosaurs.
None of it makes much sense if we examine the premise too closely, but why would you? The End of Oak Street isn’t trying to convince us that this could really happen. It is a creature feature built around a gloriously improbable “what if?” and populated by actors good enough to make us care about the people caught in the middle.
The PG-13 rating is earned. There are genuine scares, some fairly intense dinosaur attacks, and moments that may be too frightening for very young children. Aside from those fright elements, I found it surprisingly fun for the whole family—the kind of movie older kids and adults can enjoy together, accepting from the beginning that reality has temporarily left the building.
I liked The End of Oak Street precisely because it is so odd. Hathaway and McGregor give the madness a solid center, the dinosaurs look terrific, and the movie delivers enough twists to keep its silly premise from growing monotonous. It knows what it is, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither should we.
Sometimes it is enough to sit back and enjoy watching a nice suburban family discover that the thing rustling around in the backyard is far worse than a raccoon.