To fully appreciate the sheer madness of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, it helps to approach it as a satire of the survival movie genre rather than simply another big-budget disaster film. It is exhilaratingly fearless, frequently ridiculous and, at its best, so committed to its own strange logic that you begin to wonder whether Mitchell is having a joke at your expense. The remarkable thing is that he never seems to break character.
That comes as little surprise from the director of It Follows, one of the most genuinely frightening horror films of recent years, and Under the Silver Lake, the cinematic equivalent of Marmite. You either surrender to its peculiar wavelength of self-centredness or find yourself staring at the screen wondering what on earth Mitchell is doing. The End of Oak Street occupies similarly strange territory, although this time he appears to have replaced LA’s toxic sexual politics with killer dinosaurs.
Following a mysterious cosmic event, Oak Street is ripped from suburban America and deposited in a prehistoric world. The houses remain intact, but everything beyond the familiar lawns and driveways has become a wilderness populated by creatures that have absolutely no respect for the boundaries of private property.
For the Platt family, survival means sticking together. But, as with most disaster movies, the catastrophe outside is really an excuse to expose the problems that were already waiting inside the home.
Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is a particularly fascinating woman. She has become dissatisfied with her marriage to Greg (Ewan McGregor), a perfectly decent, loving husband who simply no longer challenges her. She is secretly writing a book and dreams of having a life beyond the one she has built for herself. Suddenly finding yourself surrounded by prehistoric predators might seem like a terrible time for a midlife reassessment, but Mitchell clearly sees the apocalypse as the perfect catalyst for Denise to reconsider everything.
Hathaway and McGregor play these scenes with just enough seriousness to make the absurdity work. There are moments when the dialogue is so outrageously straight-faced that it becomes almost surreal comedy. People discuss relationships, ambition and family grievances while the world outside has essentially become Jurassic Park. There is even a cute moment between Greg and Denise when they stumble upon two prehistoric creatures in the middle of a private encounter. The ridiculousness of this scene alone is worth the price of admission.
Mitchell understands that the sci-fi genre is often less interested in the science itself than in what happens to ordinary people when normality disappears. Here, he takes that idea, perhaps too literally. The suburban street, traditionally a symbol of safety, routine and conformity, becomes a prison surrounded by danger on every corner.
What’s striking is how precisely Mitchell nails the period. The film is set in the early 1980s, and the production design does the unglamorous, unshowy work of actually convincing you of it, rather than just leaning on a needle drop and calling it a day.
The cars parked along Oak Street have the right boxy look of the era, the clothes favour muted, sensible fabrics over any kind of nostalgic pastiche, and the trainers, a small detail, but one that’s easy to get wrong, look genuinely worn-in rather than costume-department new. Even the way the characters talk to one another has an unforced period rhythm: a certain politeness and restraint, a reluctance to say exactly what they mean, that feels closer to how people actually spoke in 1982 than to how films usually imagine it.
The film’s 100 minute running time is another advantage. Mitchell doesn’t overstay his welcome, and the combination of Michael Gioulakis’s striking cinematography, Michael Giacchino’s propulsive score and carefully chosen needle drops gives the film the scale of a conventional blockbuster while preserving its wonderfully peculiar sense of humour.
There are some decent performances all around from the younger members of the cast, which includes Maisy Stella as the Platts’ science-obsessed teenage daughter Audrey and Christian Convery, who plays their troubled 13-year-old son Brian. Meanwhile, P.J. Byrne delivers a brilliant turn as the family’s irate next-door neighbour Mel Jacobs, a man who has turned complaining into an art form.
Somehow, against all reasonable expectations, Mitchell makes the whole bonkers thing work. Some will hate that it even exists; I, for one, thought it was a hoot from start to finish.
