Crew
Director/Screenplay – David Robert Mitchell, Producers – J.J. Abrams, Jon Cohen, Tommy Harper, Matt Jackson, Hannah Minghella & David Robert Mitchell, Photography – Michael Gioulakis, Music – Michael Giacchino, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jay Cooper, Visual Effects – Industrial Loght and Magic (Supervisors – Trevor Hazel & Gabriel Reichle) & Lola VFX Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Production Design – Maya Shimoguchi. Production Company – Bad Robot/Domain Entertainment/Jackson Pictures.
Cast
Anne Hathaway (Denise Platt), Ewan McGregor (Greg Platt), Christian Convery (Brian Platt), Maisy Stella (Audrey Platt), Jordan Alexa Davis (Jeannette Christiansen), P.J. Byrne (Mel Jacobs), Ann Gee Byrd (Barbara Huddleston), Hudson Meek (Kaden Tucker), Emily Kuroda (Doris Valcourt)
Plot
It is 1982. Husband and wife Greg and Denise Platt live in the suburb of Flowervale, Michigan with their teenage children Audrey and Brian. There are peculiar anomalies around the neighbourhood, including mystery lights appearing at night. One morning, they wake up to find the power and water off. As they go out to explore what happened, things become increasingly stranger – the atmosphere is warmer, the suburb abruptly ends and becomes heavy jungle. The area is suddenly overrun by dinosaurs and they realise that Flowervale has somehow been transported back in time to prehistory.
The End of Oak Street was the fourth film for director/writer David Robert Mitchell. Mitchell first appeared with the Coming of Age film The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and then had a sleeper hit with the horror film It Follows (2014). The surprise is that Mitchell has never capitalised on that success. His follow-up film, the strange Under the Silver Lake (2018), bounced around different release dates and received a mixed reception. In the seven years after, Mitchell has been associated with various projects, most often an announced It Follows sequel, before returning here.
The Dinosaur Film has been its own genre niche ever since the success of Jurassic Park (1993) and has produced dozens of B-budget copycats since. The theme of the dinosaurs transported through time into the present day has appeared in several films such as My Science Project (1985), the recent Primitive War (2025) and most notedly in the Doctor Who episode Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). The other way around with people visiting prehistory appears in A Sound of Thunder (2005), 100 Million BC (2008) and (sort of) in 65 (2023).
Even though the publicity department has told us the essential premise of The End of Oak Street before we enter the theatre, David Robert Mitchell does an impeccable job in building up a sense of mystery at the outset with anomalies like the mountain of dinosaur poo on the neighbour’s lawn, the strange plant and then Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor puzzling over the heat and seeing the shadows of things scuttling through the bushes. This is something that Mitchell draws out for the first thirty minutes.
The End of Oak Street is also a film where the premise ‘dinosaurs in suburbia’ is the whole of the film. There is not a whole lot else, least of all in terms of explanations, and where the only real complications are how to avoid getting eaten and find a way back home. This does offer the appealingly banal contrasts of dinosaurs and aspects of 1980s suburbia – dinosaurs rooting through garbage cans, emerging out of or drinking the contents of backyard swimming pools, a long-necked brontosaurus eating the contents of an overturned ice cream truck, or massive footprints embedded in neatly mown lawns.
David Robert Mitchell generates a reasonable level of tension and keeps the film moving at a fast pace. And Industrial Light and Magic are on top form when it comes to the dinosaurs. It is also nice seeing dinosaurs with feathers as was the likely biological reality. We even get dinosaur sex scenes. It all generates a modestly entertaining and quite reasonable film.
The only criticism of The End of Oak Street I would make is the ending. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here the family, all but for Ewan McGregor, travel back through the timewarp. They arrive just before the original transference was to occur. They use this to call Ewan to them and prevent him from going back. (It also confusingly says that there wasn’t enough time to prevent the town being transferred, before this is later contradicted by a bunch of people interviewed on tv thanking them for saving them).
[PLOT SPOILERS CONTINUE] But the biggest causal flaw is this. If they save Ewan but fail to prevent the town from being timeslipped then their earlier selves still end up being transported back. So this ends up with a causal loop where their selves (minus Ewan) go back, find their way back to the present again presumably and then we end up with two sets of the family running around in 1982. Not to mention it is also Ewan settling in and experiencing life as no different alongside a family that has the experience of being transported back to prehistory and seeing him killed.
Trailer here