The End of Oak Street review: 'Jurassic Park meets The Twilight Zone'
Anne Hathaway is the stand-out star of The End of Oak Street, which sits somewhere between summer blockbuster and art house horror, writes Alistair Harkness
Jurassic Park meets The Twilight Zone in The End of Oak Street, a high-concept creature feature about a family who wake up to find their entire neighbourhood overrun with dinosaurs. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), and produced by JJ Abrams (there are echoes of Abrams’ coming-of-age monster movie Super 8), it’s got an odd mix of tones, as if it can’t decide if it wants to be a pastiche of an even earlier type of Spielberg movie (the film is set in 1982), a full blown arthouse horror film or a straight-up summer blockbuster. That it ends up an amalgam of all three is not unentertaining, but it does make for an odd viewing experience – and the finale feels like betrayal of Anne Hathaway’s character.
She plays Denise Platt, an unhappily married suburban mum who’s been channelling her discontent with her under-employed husband Gregg (Ewan McGregor) into a novel about a woman contemplating leaving her family. Gregg’s doing his best, but his refusal to confront anything head-on is killing their marriage, something their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisey Stella and Christian Convery) are starting to pick up on.
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The film takes its time setting all this up, with Mitchell shooting the domestic scenes with long lenses and split-diopter shots to intensify the familial discord. He also cleverly weaves in the sci-fi elements via 360-degree tracking shots that slyly capture the imminent danger lurking in the background. But a self-parodying B-movie score makes you wonder how invested we’re supposed to be in all this and the ease with which the film resolves its central mystery undercuts its more unexpected twists. Still, Hathaway – acting everyone else off the screen – is great, even as the film around her morphs into a goofier story than her character deserves.
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