'The End of Oak Street' Is the Best Kind of Summer Film

It’s rare that you get a real rope-a-dope in modern cinema. Between trailers, the internet, advance screenings/reviews, it’s hard to maintain any real sense of surprise anymore. Sure, we get the occasional “Captain-America-wielding-Thor’s-hammer” moment, but those are mere moments - fleeting at best.

Writer/Director David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street tries its very best to upend that (so beware, mild spoilers will inevitably follow) by setting the tone for his film with a quiet, Spielbergian beginning - in an adorably bucolic unnamed American town in 1982, the Platt family - wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) and their teenage children Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) are enjoying Oak Street’s neighborhood block party. Footballs are being tossed, bikes are being ridden, burgers are being barbecued, and everything is pure apple pie.

Cracks quickly start to show - Greg is spending too much time away from the family, Denise feels unseen and unappreciated and is secretly working on a novel that reflects her disaffected life, Brian is getting in trouble, and Audrey has secrets of her own. But things really take a turn when inexplicably and mysteriously, in the middle of the night … their entire neighborhood is transported 150 million years into the past. Suddenly, there’s no power, no water, no communication and worst of all, of course, are the dinosaurs.

This is where that previously noted Spielbergian story comes screeching to a halt. Instead of turning into a Jurassic Park-esque story of wonderment peppered with a bit of excitement and danger, The End of Oak Street swings for the fences and turns into a full-fledged survival-horror film. David Allen Mitchell proved his horror bona fides with 2014’s surprisingly great It Follows, and while this isn’t quite as terrifying as that film, it also pulls very few punches. Neighbors are suddenly being torn to pieces, grisly bodies are littering their once-pleasant suburban streets, and nightmares are roaming every corner. Mitchell’s camera work and scene-setting is part of the fun - mysterious sounds in the background, movements shuffling in the bushes, flashes of horrors unknown slip past the characters unseen in the background, all contributing to the mounting tension.

The tonal shift builds slowly and effectively, and the film becomes a bracing, breathless nightmare as the Platts fight for survival while also fighting each other as those earlier cracks begin to splinter and break under the pressures of their new (old) world. Those are the film’s most effective moments, when in the face of terror all around them, the family struggles with how to prevail over both the monsters and themselves. Hathaway and McGregor are spectacular here, perfectly playing their roles as a fractured couple fighting through their difficulties to save their family. Hathaway’s Denise has a survivor’s instinct and becomes surprisingly tenacious while adapting to these harrowing new dangers, while McGregor’s Greg frustrates with his relentless positivity, an aw-shucks, it’ll-be-OK attitude that is wholly incongruous and ultimately useless given the carnage around them.

The performances of the kids are equally excellent, if a little rough on occasion. But they precariously bridge that divide between terrified and wanting to believe their father’s increasingly empty promises. All four of them (and the foursome really are the heart of the movie - almost everyone else perishes gruesomely at some point other than a friendly neighbor girl) achieve excellent chemistry together, and their horror and panic is palpable and believable.

The family alternates between tension and hysteria, and that in and of itself sells the admittedly silly premise and at times clunky effects. There is definitely some suspension of disbelief needed, but the performances are strong enough, the pace fast enough, and the excitement thrilling enough that audiences just buckle in and go for the ride.

The End of Oak Street is a rare gem for a summer of mega blockbusters - with a budget of $80 million, it’s hardly the costly juggernaut that superhero or Fast/Furious franchises are. Its characters are its core and spearheaded by Hathaway and McGregor and a strong script that doesn’t skimp on the human element, the film becomes an emotional journey as well as a horror movie. Even better, thanks to brisk pacing and few wasted moments, it’s 99-minute runtime feels just full enough, never dragging or making audiences check their watch. It’s fun, well-paced, and elevated by excellent casting and steady-handed direction, making it fun, exciting, scary and interesting - the best kind of summer film one could ask for.