The year is 2026. Iconic things like Cadbury Bytes, chivalry, transferring songs to your friends via Bluetooth, and a film certification board that certifies films instead of cutting kissing scenes... are all dead. Amongst these casualties is also the art of making a film that wears its absurdity as a badge of honour rather than an accident, a film that knows exactly how ridiculous it is, and commits to it anyway with complete sincerity. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s The End of Oak Street does its best to try and revive that genre of film and, for the most part, succeeds.
The film’s story is reminiscent of the ones produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment back in the 80s and 90s. It’s 1982. A family consisting of Denise (Hathaway), Greg (McGregor) and their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), accompanied by the family dog, Starbuck (played by Australian cattle dogs Buzz and Brisket) are living a seemingly happy and normal life in an American suburb. Until one day they wake up to realise that they have some new neighbours... that are really old and the only way to survive is to stick together.
The film doesn't shy away from its Amblin DNA. Multiple shots and scenes are homages to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and of course, Jurassic Park. Michael Giacchino’s score is warm, full of wonder and knowingly nostalgic, which transports you back in time. But that's about where the homage ends, because The End of Oak Street does things the Amblin films never did.
Having previously directed It Follows (2014), it’s no surprise that writer-director David Robert Mitchell knows his way around building tension and jump scares. Here, he uses an inventive mix of historically plausible dinosaurs and creatures that are, let's say, cinematically motivated rather than paleontologically endorsed. Unlike some other films in the same genre, the dinosaurs here are not friendly; some of them are vegetarian at best. The violence is visceral, exaggerated and more comical than one would expect.
That said, the movie is incredibly silly. Several plot points and character quirks are completely unnecessary, and the logic is often missing. The ‘solution’ to the central problem shows up an hour into the film and makes way for convenient storytelling. It is as though Mitchell and his team built the scares first and then constructed a narrative around them, rather than the other way around. More than once, the characters stand in front of the very danger that they are trying to escape from until the danger becomes so imminent that they have no choice but to try and escape, or defend themselves. The movie can be as maddening as it is entertaining, and the line between the two shifts without warning.
What saves The End of Oak Street, every time it threatens to lose you entirely, are the performances. Hathaway and McGregor scream, run, grieve, and fight with such complete and utter sincerity that you have no reasonable choice but to believe the unbelievable.
The film makes some wild swings that will have your jaw on the floor only to then have you frowning 20 minutes later, show you its potential as a creature feature only to then break the tension with something gloriously stupid, and make you laugh at unintentionally absurd moments only to then make you laugh at intentionally emotional ones.
In short, The End of Oak Street is exactly like that one dog that keeps finding itself in moments of trouble, but you can't really get mad at it because it's honest, self-aware, and just wants to entertain you. All you can do is give it your attention, clench your jaw and hide your face when it's about to do something silly, laugh after it does so anyway, and just keep watching.