The End of Oak Street is a very good creature feature bolted onto a family drama it never finishes. For about an hour it is the most purely enjoyable studio picture of the summer — quick, cruel, funnier than it needs to be, and built by someone who understands that a dinosaur in a cul-de-sac is worse than a dinosaur in a jungle. It also spends its first twenty minutes carefully assembling a marriage in trouble, then hands that marriage to the plot to resolve. Three bulbs.
What is it actually about?
Flowervale, a suburb outside Detroit, summer 1982. Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor) has told his wife he was rehired; he is in fact delivering pizzas and keeping a bottle in the garage. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel in the basement about a woman who walks out on her family, and has told nobody. Audrey (Maisy Stella) wants Cornell and Carl Sagan and knows her parents can't pay for it. Brian (Christian Convery) is thirteen and being hunted by a bully. Then the lights start.
How does it look and sound?
Mitchell shoots suburbia the way he shot it in It Follows — patient, wide, slightly too still — and then puts something enormous into the frame without changing his rhythm. Michael Gioulakis keeps finding split-diopter setups that hold a face and a threat in focus together, a cheap trick that works every single time. Michael Giacchino's score does its job and little else. The real work is in the sound design, which spends twenty minutes teaching you to be frightened of quiet and then collects on it for an hour.
Do Hathaway and McGregor land it?
Hathaway gets the better part and takes it. Denise is the one doing arithmetic while everyone else is having feelings, and Hathaway plays that competence as something the character is discovering rather than something she had been hiding. McGregor's Greg is the optimist, the one who wants to wait it out, the parent whose instinct is faith. It is a straight inversion of how these two roles usually get cast in a 1982-set film, the movie plainly knows it, and it mostly declines to comment — which is the classier choice.
Where it hesitates is in trusting that setup. Both of them are avoiding the same conversation, and the first act builds that avoidance carefully. The film then finds a way to stop needing it.
What is wrong with Brian?
The script hands him the oldest job in the genre — the child who sees it first and isn't believed — and then, having established him as the only person in the house who was right, spends the rest of the runtime using him as a hazard. He runs when he should hold still. He shouts when the shouting is what draws the thing. He calls for his mother, again and again, in situations where calling is the mistake.
There is a reading where this is honest: a thirteen year old who has been listening to his parents fight through a wall would come apart. But the film never slows down enough to make that argument. It needs someone to generate the next problem, and Brian is the one holding the door open.
Are the dinosaurs any good?
They are the best thing here. They are feathered — properly feathered rather than decorated — which puts the design a long way from the Jurassic house style and lets them read as animals instead of monsters. They eat, they mate, they lose interest and wander off. And the film finds a rhythm early: a scare is almost always followed by a worse one about four seconds later, and it stays funny long past the point where it should have worn out.
So is it worth the evening?
Comparisons to the Jurassic World pictures are the wrong shape. This is a smaller film with a smaller idea and it is closer to a Twilight Zone episode with a budget and it works at that scale precisely because it wants less. What it does not do is finish what it starts. The marriage the first act builds so carefully is not repaired by anyone in it. It is repaired by the plot.
The death
Greg is killed about two-thirds of the way through by an Allosaurus — the big two-legged predator most people would file under T. rex — after going at it with a sledgehammer. The sequence is genuinely shocking and the film has earned it. McGregor has spent an hour being the household's optimist, and optimism is precisely what gets him killed.
The pizza order
Denise, the children and Jeannette Christiansen (Jordan Alexa Davis) — a neighbour's daughter the kids find after her parents are killed — reach a wormhole above the librarian's house and come out on Oak Street about twenty minutes before the light takes it. Denise spends that time warning neighbours and phoning in a pizza order that sends Greg to a delivery outside the radius.
It is a superb piece of thinking under pressure, and it is worth being precise about why. She cannot reach him directly. Even if she could, she has no idea how he would take it — this is a man she was preparing to leave, hearing his wife's voice telling him the world is about to end. So she does not try to persuade him. She uses the one system that reliably moves him and cannot argue back.
The epilogue
Two years on, Denise's book has sold and Audrey is at Cornell. Then, at the barbecue, there are two Jeannettes: the one who came back through, and the one who was warned and lived. Which tells you what happened to everyone else. The Platts standing in that garden are the ones who came through. The Denise, Audrey and Brian who belonged to that timeline went into the light and did not come out. Denise did not only save her husband. She chose which version of her family got to exist.
The film shows you this and declines to discuss it. That is a real directorial decision and a defensible one — it trusts you to sit with it. But it is also why the marriage never lands. Greg and Denise's problem was that neither of them would say the true thing out loud. The resolution is not that they finally do. The resolution is that Denise acquires a Greg who has not had the argument yet.
One smaller thing, offered as reading rather than fact: there is a current between Audrey and Jeannette that the film keeps in frame and never states. A look held a beat long, a bandage applied a little too carefully. Given how flatly 1982 suburbia usually gets written, the restraint reads as intentional rather than nervous.
Bright Bulbs
- Feathered creature design that reads as animal behaviour rather than monster staging.
- Ninety nine minutes with no fat on it.
- Hathaway plays Denise's competence as discovery, not as a reveal.
- The scare then worse scare rhythm stays funny for the whole runtime.
- Gioulakis holding a face and a threat in the same plane of focus.
Dull Bulbs
- Giacchino's score is functional and anonymous.
- Audrey does most of the film's explaining and gets the least written interior life.
- The Amblin pastiche sits close enough to its sources that several critics have called it a copy rather than an homage.
Shattered Bulbs
- Brian is written as a hazard rather than a person, in a film that had already given him the better role.
- The marriage built so carefully in the first act is resolved by a plot mechanism instead of by either spouse.
Cast
- Anne Hathaway as Denise Platt
- Ewan McGregor as Greg Platt
- Maisy Stella as Audrey Platt
- Christian Convery as Brian Platt
- Jordan Alexa Davis as Jeannette Christiansen
- Emily Kuroda as Mrs. Valcourt
- P.J. Byrne as Mel Jacobs