The End of Oak Street

Image credit: Rotten Tomatoes

It’s not always the case, but more often than not it totally is the case that going to see a movie based on nothing other than a mild understanding of the plot and its featuring actors that you like, can end up being the best cinematic experience you’ve had in a while. We sometimes forget that getting pre-emptively excited about a film can curdle the experience of watching it because (often) it’s not as good as what you excitedly imagined it would be.

A couple of weeks ago, Partner and I decided to have a spur-of-the-moment date night and go see a movie. Being based in the country, our ‘local’ cinema doesn’t hold as many options as the main chains that we’ve been used to having in the city so our options were limited. But as luck would have it, the cinema was showing The End of Oak Street: a thriller-y sounding flick that turned out to be an absolute prehistoric romp!

In the quaint, suburban community of Oak Street lives a picture-perfect family. But there is trouble in paradise. Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is unsatisfied with her marriage and writes basement novels about leaving her family and starting a new life. Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor) has been laid off and is trying to make ends meet and keep the family together. Their daughter Audry is thinking about life after high school, and their son Brian is both the perpetrator and victim of bullying. But when a wholly unbelievable cosmic event transports their entire neighbourhood back to a prehistoric age, their troubles start to look pretty small in comparison.

I walked into The End of Oak Street thinking that this will be a silly and fun dino-survival movie. And I was delightfully surprised to find that it’s so much more. For a start, it’s a film that travels a different road to the main, generic highway that most monster movies do. Regardless of species, zombies in Night of the Living Dead, the shark in Jaws, or the alien in, well, Alien, most monsters work as a narrative catalyst to spark dissension in the ranks, the breakdown of society, and horrific truths that humans are the really just the worst. But in The End of Oak Street the breakdown of the civility and the strain of human relationships is already happening from the first reel. Producer J. J Abrams’ love of Stephen Speilberg bulldozes its way to the front with the overly nostalgic 1980s suburban setting: an idealistic Golden Age that houses a crumbling nuclear family and frayed relations within the community. The ‘work’ of the monsters is already underway so when the dinos actually turn up, they become a catalyst for people banding together rather than breaking apart. And as the protagonists start to piece together some theories as to why their manicured backyard is suddenly overrun with prehistoric flora, completely unexpected plot twists bubble up to alter the audience’s ideas about where the story is headed.

Image credit: Village Cinema

While the characters are a dime-a-dozen dissatisfied suburban types, the central cast delivers performances that are relatable and down-to-earth that make you feel interested in them and their welfare instead of immediately loving or hating them. This is another way in which the film differs from other monster survival movies, as it gently convinces you to ride along with these people rather than sit back and eagerly anticipate the good ones getting saved and the bad ones getting eaten. And before you know it, you’re caring about them on some level, so when something happens to them the shock is real.

Filled with drama, action, and even a few humorous scenes, The End of Oak Street is a delight. It’s an unexpected romp that gently rearranges the building blocks of genre to make something recognisable, but subtly different to what we’ve seen before in other monster movies.

Director: David Robert Mitchell, 2026

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davies, P. J Byrne, Anne Gee Byrd, & Emily Kuroda