From the director of It Follows comes the summer dinosaurs-in-the-suburbs epic, The End Of Oak Street, starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway. Our review:

A shadow looms large over The End Of Oak Street, and it isn’t a dinosaur: it’s the early work of Steven Spielberg.

Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, this is a summer action adventure firmly in the Amblin mode: it’s set in 1982 (the year a certain Spielberg blockbuster came out), it’s set in a cosy American suburb where kids in tight trousers ride around on bikes. There are untidy relationships and chaotic dinner scenes where kids talk over each other. And then there are dinosaurs chasing cats and knocking over bins. You probably don’t need to be reminded which Spielberg film those hark back to.

The set-up, meanwhile, is akin to an old Twilight Zone episode (a series which itself has a Spielberg connection – he produced and directed a segment of the infamous 1983 movie). With a flash of light, a strange cosmic event sees the titular suburb picked up and swept back millions of years to Earth’s leafier, deadlier past. 

Unaware of what’s happened, the Platt family wakes up one morning to find their house looking just as it did the night before – except the power’s out, the taps have stopped working, and the air feels unusually humid. Then astronomy-loving teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) sees a dinosaur disappear into a hedge in the back garden, and everyone, quite understandably, begins freaking out.

The father, Greg (Ewan McGregor), a cautious soul by nature, advises they barricade the windows and doors and wait it out. The mother, Denise (Anne Hathaway) prefers a more proactive approach, though this may stem from how unhappy she is in her marriage; a budding author, she’s spent her evenings writing a novel about a miserable woman who longs for escape. 

Then their young son, Brian (Christian Convery), rushes off to find their missing dog, Starbuck (seemingly the only actor in the film doing promotional interviews), which forces everyone out of the house and into the chaos-ridden neighbourhood.

Mitchell previously directed 2015’s It Follows, one of the best American horror films of the 2010s, and followed it up with the bold, eccentric swing that was 2018’s Under The Silver Lake. Both films marked Mitchell out as a technically confident filmmaker who weaves his directorial influences through his own work. It Follows was filled with fluid camera moves straight out of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out; a sequence in Under The Silver Lake references George Cukor’s unreleased Marilyn Monroe movie, Something’s Got To Give.

After Under The Silver Lake was underservedly cut adrift by a confused-seeming A24, The End Of Oak Street sees Mitchell take an obvious step towards the mainstream. It’s produced by JJ Abrams, a director who was held up as a successor to Spielberg for a while – his 2011 adventure Super 8 looks in retrospect like the early ancestor of Stranger Things and the whole kids-on-bikes genre it brought back into vogue.

But if The End Of Oak Street does feel self-consciously Spielbergian in places, Mitchell’s own style still shines through: rated 12A, this isn’t a particularly graphic movie by necessity, but it is surprisingly vicious in places. The dinosaurs themselves aren’t stately or majestic; they’re scuzzy, scrabbling things that chase down and eat whatever’s in front of them. There are parts of the film that have Joe Dante’s mischievous streak – there’s a sense of glee to the way Mitchell has his lizards menace sweet old ladies, ransack pristine lawns or chow down on the contents of ice cream vans. 

Although this film’s less conspicuously stylish than in It Follows, Mitchell and regular cinematographer Mike Gioulakis make creative use of split-diopter shots and sweeping camera pans to accentuate the chaos and unease. There’s also some solid production design, with the film reprising the 80s in a way that feels lived-in and rough around the edges.

Unlike more recent Jurassic Park movies, meanwhile, The End Of Oak Street doesn’t overload itself with big set-pieces. There are some tense, exciting moments – one standout involving a huge yet disturbingly silent serpent – but the characters remain firmly in the foreground. A dying relationship may not sound like ideal fodder for a summer movie, but the Platt family are captivatingly ordinary. McGregor’s dad is a well-meaning guy whose career’s gone sideways and feels privately ashamed about it; Hathaway’s mother has creative dreams that feel stifled by the mundanity of suburbia and the grind of parenthood.

When the dinosaurs attack, it’s easy to become wrapped up in their plight. They’re characters worth caring about, and Mitchell constantly reminds us that the assorted bites, scrapes and leaps from high places actually hurt. 

There’s nothing revolutionary going on in The End Of Oak Street, then, but there’s real heart and creative vim driving it along – not to mention Michael Giacchino’s score, which is both fittingly retro and, in places, unsettlingly weird. And while Mitchell may have tempered his sensibilities for a multiplex crowd, there’s still teeth to his story. Even its more soft-focus moments have a darker implication lurking beneath the surface.

[4STARS]

The End Of Oak Street is in cinemas now.