The End of Oak Street review – Welcome to Jurassic Place

In a strange coincidence, within the same week, two new movies have released about a suburban family, complete with dog in tow, trying to survive mysterious cosmic events. But while one – Netflix’s The Last House – has become a competitive sport to bash online, the other, Warner Bros.’ The End of Oak Street is the most throwback-style fun audiences can have at the cinema right now.

The End of Oak Street is the kind of film you want to watch in a packed movie house, going along with the communal gasps, wails and cheers. It’s the movie equivalent of a theme park ride: not a rollercoaster, but one of those on-rails animatronic experiences with dizzying direction turns, jump scares out of the quiet, shakes and splashes, and the emotional equivalent of a waterfall plunge. The closest blockbuster comparison you can make is to the first Jurassic Park, and, to a lesser extent, the likes of Poltergeist, Jaws and Arachnophobia. For the record, The End of Oak Street is produced by J. J. Abrams, who definitely comes from the Spielberg school of event movie-making, with Super 8 and the Cloverfield franchise on his filmography, alongside Star Wars and Star Trek.

The End of Oak Street is all-in when it comes to conveying a sense of yesteryear. Set in the early 1980s, the film centres on the Platts, who, to casual observers, appear to be the perfect family. Behind closed doors though, this nuclear unit is on the brink of breaking apart. Wife and mother Denise (Anne Hathaway) feels stifled by domesticity, and clashes on the personality and priority front with optimist husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), as financial struggles wear them down. Meanwhile, their kids are well aware of the drama, with high school senior Audrey (Maisy Stella) lacking funds to go to her dream college and younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) acting out in response to the possibility of his parents’ divorce. All these problems are forgotten, though, when the Platts wake up one morning, and discover their whole neighbourhood has been transported through space and time, dumping them in a prehistoric landscape where humans are easy prey.

Surrounded by blockbusters with two-and-a-half to three-hour runtimes, The End of Oak Street stands out as an example of supremely efficient filmmaking. Not even 100 minutes, the movie is pared to the bone, refusing to over-explain its central concept, and adopting a show-not-tell approach to its world instead. Without a single word, information can be gleaned from a photo wall, or the decorations in a teenager’s room. In addition, writer-director David Robert Mitchell often doubles up the impact of key moments with idiosyncratic framing that lets audiences experience multiple actors’ emotions in focus at the same time, instead of cutting back and forth between their faces.

There’s a lot of that, actually. Mitchell, who made the cult horror hit It Follows, understands the power of long, unbroken takes, and carefully setup shots that monsters can silently step or slither into. Watch out for a particularly stressful sequence involving a giant snake.

On that note, The End of Oak Street may use loads of CGI to bring its creatures to life, but you don’t feel it. The film never lingers on its dinosaurs, now feathered and coloured in line with modern palaeontology theories. Unlike the makers of the last several Jurassic Park movies, Mitchell grasps that for his film to be emotionally effective, it’s not about perving over slick special effects. While you can’t say the Platts are especially well developed as characters, they are given sufficient screen time to appear as normal, relatable people, with more demanded of the cast, performance-wise, than simply acting scared. The result is that when the Platts are in peril, you care because they, and the film as a whole, have run the full feeling gamut.

Unlike so much big budget live-action content out of Hollywood these days, The End of Oak Street is a movie with stakes, and shocks. It’s not the smartest, as characters sometimes make strange decisions that manoeuvre them into danger, evidently for no other reason than viewer entertainment value. However, like blockbusters from previous eras, it refuses to pull its punches, going to darker places and showing darker things – cat lovers should be aware that the film implies feline death, and shows dead pets being eaten.

Still, The End of Oak Stret delivers the thrilling goods. And it does so in a way that reminds moviegoers how this kind of high-concept mid-year blockbuster can be done right, by going back to the principles that launched this popular popcorn entertainment form in the first place: namely a well-considered balance between dazzle and a relatable, domestic dynamic.

The End of Oak Street is in cinemas from Friday, 14 August.