Director: David Robert Mitchell
Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella.
Rating: 4/5
The setting of David Robert Mitchell is familiar to anyone who knows the filmmaker’s work so far, and to everyone who has been watching American blockbusters since the 1980s. It’s the deconstruction of American suburbia, packed with ennui in Robert Mitchell’s work, and celebrated in the general propaganda machine of the American studio system.
The two of them merged together in one single film, was not the kind of collaboration I was expecting. Robert Mitchell, after all, enjoyed staying on the fringes, observing the myth of the American suburban dream consumed by weariness and apathy.
In contrast, the studios saw in the setting the personification of the great American dream. Even today, watching this film in 2026 in Australia, I’m jealous of that aggressively middle-class house. Can’t have that lifestyle without a good inheritance nowadays.
The End of Oak Street starts with a typical block party in the 80s. Families gather, the kids ride their bikes around, teenagers flirt with each other, and the adults speak platitudes to each other in between flipping burgers. “You have a perfect family”, someone says to Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor), and of course he does. His wife is the beautiful Denise (Anne Hathaway), his children Audrey (Maisey Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) complete the perfect nuclear tableau. But underneath this sickening perfection, Greg and Denise are having marital issues, and even the kids can see the marriage is in its last throes.
A couple of nights after the block party, something strange happens. A bizarre cosmical event transports the entire neighbourhood to the prehistoric era. Dinosaurs roam the streets and there is no escape back to the present. Like a certain recent pandemic, people retreated to their own homes. Robert Mitchell, observant as he is, portrays a community that ceases to exist altogether, challenging the notion we all like to believe that when it finally hits the fan, we will be here for each other. Will we, though?
The moment the Platts come across a velociraptor, they run back home, running over poor bystanders being mauled by dinosaurs. They barricade themselves in the safety of their dwelling and make no effort to attempt to contact their neighbours. Every family for itself, says Robert Mitchell.
What is refreshing is how the film is built in our visual imagination of the era. Robert Mitchell and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, have fun with slow zooms, soft lightings and many split diopter shots. The last one is a treat; split diopter shots are where a character is in focus in the foreground, and something else is also in focus in the foreground. Remember that scene in Jaws when Brody is talking to someone while trying to pay attention to some unaware swimmers just before the first big shark attack? It’s that shot.
Spielberg is the right reference here. He started the style of suburban American horror/fantasy/science fiction. His style of everyday American thrown in the deep end of some unexplained event was the basis for films that Spielberg directed and produced. End of Oak Street has the same weight as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Carrie, and The Goonies.
And yet, Robert Mitchell doesn’t make his film a self-reference parody, nor is it engulfed in nostalgia. Even Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack is reminiscent of John Williams without trying to mimic it. Robert Mitchell seems to be calling us, the audience, to that familiar place, to then deconstruct our expectations.
It’s the expectation that everyone is going to be safe. That we can help and trust our fellow neighbour. That the boy will get the cute girl and the bully gets its commeuppance. It’s even the expectation of what dinosaurs look like (in a stroke of genius, Robert Mitchell gives them feathers, undoing that crime from Jurassic Park) or how they react. We see them defecating and mating, like normal animals.
And yet this is all wrapped in 100 minutes of pure unapologetic fun. The End of Oak Street is a crowd pleaser if there was one this year. Tight and straight to the point, but also unexpected and unpredictable. It’s been awhile I’ve witnessed an audience so engaged in the last twenty minutes. If I have a complaint is that the lack of colour in the art direction doesn’t take advantage of the film’s unique position. But that is nitpicking. People gasped, some applauded, and everyone laughed at the delightful absurdity of it all.
An immensely satisfying action/sci-fi that, when the dust settles, still manages to unexpectedly bring something new to the table.
