by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
Intro:
… stacks everything into the pure survival stakes of the story and its characters, creating a sense of immediate in-the-moment thrills and even solid laughs that aren’t weighed down by anything all that heady in terms of theme.
Familiarity is the antithesis of wonder. No matter how grand or magnificent a sight or general experience may be, it loses its impact once it stops being a once-in-a-lifetime moment and becomes part of the everyday. Every feature film about dinosaurs that has come out since Jurassic Park, knowingly or otherwise, refers back to it, creating this gnarled web of intertextuality that adds to the lessened grandeur of it all because it’s all trying to recreate a feeling that even its own sequels and reboots couldn’t manage.
But David Robert Mitchell’s latest, astoundingly, does.
With a story foundation of “they’re just here now” that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a Cloverfield installment, The End of Oak Street takes a typical suburban family from early-‘80s Detroit, and transplants them (along with their entire neighbourhood) right into the age of the dinosaurs. The period detail and colour palette choices are as much old-school Spielberg as they are mildly Stephen King, and the scooped-out-of-time geography is reminiscent of Doctor Who’s ‘Village of the Angels’, but this isn’t the kind of nostalgia exercise that just wears its influences on its sleeves for the full runtime. If anything, it treats prehistoric encounters similarly to how M. Night Shyamalan treated aliens in Signs – as far as this film is concerned, this is all new territory. No pop culture osmosis, no self-reflexivity, no undermining the raw nerve-shred of the scenario that these characters are now surrounded by; the world simply isn’t the same anymore.
That approach shows through splendidly in the film’s sense of pacing, gradually letting the tension build as all manner of feathered horrors skuttle in the background, and then breaking that tension not through histrionic string sections like audio-descriptive jumpscares but by an immediate stabbing sensation of “oh shit, run!”. It’s not as interested in mere spectacle in recreating the kaiju of yore (although the SFX work on the dinos is solid throughout) as it is in giving a grounded depiction of how an ordinary family could possibly deal with this as their new reality. Is there really any explanation for all this that could result in a calm and collected reaction? That’s more unlikely than its premise to begin with, so it’s largely left alone in favour of focusing on just making it through each singular moment.
The film’s handling of tone can get a tad askew at times, as Christian Convery’s Brian and his more voyeuristic moments hit an odd note, but even the weirder moments are treated as times to start laughing because the alternative is to break down at everything else going on. The performers are a big part of keeping that mood stable, with Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway not only landing solid hero moments against the clawed hordes, but also keeping the paranormal specifics tethered to a suitably relatable level as parents worried about what their kids (Convery and Maisy Stella as Audrey) are getting up to. Their plight, their shivering anxiety at still being at home and yet nowhere close to it at the same time, keeps things consistently intense, and when things get gory, it can range from background moments for added texture, to proper wincers.
The End of Oak Street feels like a total system reset for dinosaur cinema. Not content with just following its progenitors (save for a… familiar mound early on), it stacks everything into the pure survival stakes of the story and its characters, creating a sense of immediate in-the-moment thrills and even solid laughs that aren’t weighed down by anything all that heady in terms of theme. Coming from a director whose last film (Under the Silver Lake) was so heavy and dense that it looked ready to collapse his future career, it’s a remarkable switch-up in style that also manages to transcend its clear reference points to deliver something that long since felt like an impossible task: It makes dinosaurs genuinely scary again.
