David Robert Mitchell’s End of Oak Street serves up Poltergeist/E.T./Back to the Future/Jurassic Park vibes but the film’s pendulum swings from gory horror to family adventure in an erratic way that make sit hard to tell what it was aiming for.
THE END OF OAK STREET (2026)
★★★ of ★★★★★ stars
When I was a kid, there was a certain genre of TV shows that lived in reruns – these were a strain of family adventure shows where a family was thrust into an unexpected, otherworldy situation that caused them to place their interpersonal rivalries on the sides to survive from the challenge of living in world where giants, monsters, or even dinosaurs were an everyday occurrence. These disaster shows like Land of the Giants, Lost in Space, and Land of the Lost were frustrating in the kids were always throwing themselves in danger’s path for random reasons and the disasters awaiting them spilled certain death. When you cross that formule with the vibe of early 80’s Spielberg produced Amblin films, you get something like The End of Oak Street. Directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) and produced by Bad Robot, which has done its fair share of Amblin homages with Super 8, you’d think this would be an interesting piece. While it is a unique mish-mash, it oscillates really wildly from horror to family adventure in a way that doesn’t seem to really land.
Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) are a suburban couple in a failing marriage. Greg is taking side jobs rather than spending time with his family and keeping his wife in the dark about being laid off. Meanwhile, Denise has been fantasizing about leaving her family, even writing a book where she is the thinly veiled main character looking to pack up and start a new life. Their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) recognize how fragile the family unit is and that becomes even moreso when a vortex opens up and sends their whole neighborhood to prehistoric times and they have to deal with dinosaurs killing their friends and neighbors. The dinosaur attacks are pretty sadistic and gory, not like Jurassic Park attacks. We see the dinosaurs picking at corpses, ripping people apart limb by limb and this is without any mercy and plenty of screaming. As this happens, Greg and Denise argue about the disintegration of their marriage and their kids hear them and at the same time, Brian sees his missing dog out the window and takes off after it. This act leave sthem outside the safety of their home as dinosaurs now see them as open hunting season and tragedy is not too far off from this horizon.
I think the less you know going into THE END OF OAK STREET the better it is likely to have an impact. I think there’s some weird narrative choices in the third act to make it hew closer to a certain classic film and give it a happy ending version of Stand By Me’s ending. I’m happy to see Mitchell doing bigger projects and Christian Convery is great in this as he was in last year’s THE MONKEY playing a dual role in that film. Anne Hathaway has to carry a lot of the film’s emotional throughline and it works better in the late 2nd and 3rd act. Ewan McGregor and Hathaway have good chemistry and that inform’s a lot of the action in the dinosaur world; the two work better on screen together than alone and the film suffers in the middle when a lot of the weight of the film is placed on her in a precarious scenario. But overall, THE END OF OAK STREET is an interesting case, it kind of works as a family adventure but the dinosaur gore sort of handicaps its full potential as Jurassic Park-esque period piece.