Matt Williams

Dir. David Robert Mitchell · 99 min · ★★★½

This review contains full spoilers.

David Robert Mitchell has made four features now, and all four are about a suburb with something walking toward it. The Myth of the American Sleepover had adolescence, arriving on a summer night with the unhurried certainty of weather. It Follows had a patient, inexhaustible thing that crossed lawns at a walking pace and could not be reasoned with, only outrun and postponed. Under the Silver Lake had a conspiracy that turned out to be simultaneously real and worthless. The End of Oak Street finally makes the intruder literal. A cul-de-sac goes to sleep in the summer of 1982 and wakes up in the Mesozoic, and the thing coming across the grass weighs two tons and has no interest whatsoever in metaphor.

This is by far the largest film Mitchell has made: Warner Bros., Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams among the producers, Michael Giacchino on the score, a marketing campaign built around a photograph of an allosaur standing in a driveway. The surprise is how little of himself he seems to have traded for it. The film runs a brisk ninety-nine minutes, it is genuinely frightening in a way almost no American blockbuster bothers to be anymore, and it ends with one of the coldest scenes a major studio has released in a decade. It is confident, controlled, and—in its last five minutes—quietly vicious.

It is also, by a small but real margin, less than the film it keeps threatening to become. The middle act repeats itself. The screenplay’s most interesting idea, that a family can be destroyed and reassembled without anyone having to admit what was traded away, arrives so late and so fast that a portion of the audience will walk out believing they have seen a happy ending. And Ewan McGregor is handed a thesis where a man should be.

None of that sinks it. The End of Oak Street is three and a half out of four stars: a smart, mean, beautifully made survival picture that understands its monsters are the least frightening thing in it.

The opening twenty minutes are a block party, and they are shot like a memory somebody has decided to distrust. Mitchell has said the whole project began with a single image—a dinosaur digging through suburban garbage—and that the 1982 setting comes out of his own childhood habit of standing at the end of a dead-end street wondering what was past the chain-link fence. That wondering is the film’s actual engine. The period detail is precise without being a nostalgia showcase: no needle-drop montage, no wink at the audience about the cost of gasoline. The suburb is rendered as a place with a specific and slightly wrong geography, all sightlines that stop short, hedges you cannot see over, a treeline at the end of the street where the pavement simply gives up.

When the displacement comes, it comes without a rulebook. There are ripples reported on the news, small objects appearing where they should not be, a glow. Then a white flash in the middle of the night, and Oak Street is standing in a prehistoric floodplain with its sprinklers still running. Mitchell’s decision not to cut away to a control room, a general, or a scientist explaining the event is the single most important choice in the film. The neighborhood’s information about what has happened to it never exceeds what a frightened family standing in a garage could work out for themselves.

The dinosaurs are handled with the same discipline. They are not villains and they are not wonders. There is no shot of the Platts standing slack-jawed while a brachiosaur grazes in golden light, no John Williams swell of awe. The animals are large, indifferent, occupied with their own business, and lethal in the incidental way that a truck is lethal. When an allosaur takes a neighbor apart on his own driveway, the camera does not treat it as a set piece. It treats it as something that happens quickly to a person you had been introduced to eleven minutes earlier, in front of his house, which is still standing, with the porch light on.

Michael Gioulakis shot this, and if you have seen It Follows you know what that means: a camera that holds, that lets the deep background stay in focus, that trusts you to scan a composition instead of being told where to look. Mitchell has described his approach as putting the energy into making one frame the best frame rather than covering a scene from eight angles, and the film is full of shots that are frightening purely because nothing in them is emphasized. A wide of the cul-de-sac at dusk, houses on three sides, the mouth of the street open to the jungle. You watch that gap for the entire length of the shot. Sometimes nothing comes through it. That is worse.

The sound design is the film’s best technical achievement and probably its best piece of writing. As the Platts board up their windows, the gunshots and screaming from the other houses are progressively muffled, not by distance but by plywood—the family’s survival and the family’s deafness accomplished by the same act, in real time, without a line of dialogue about it. It is the kind of idea that a lesser film would have a character explain in the third act.

Giacchino’s score is doing something stranger than it first appears. He writes big, and here the bigness is frequently applied to events that do not deserve it: a triumphant brass figure over an escape that costs someone else their life, a surge of Americana under an image that will not support it. Played straight, it would be a miscalculation. Played against the picture, as it is, it becomes the sound of the family’s own self-narration—the way these people are scoring their ordeal to themselves even as it happens. By the epilogue, the music has become an accusation.

Anne Hathaway gives the film its spine and, more impressively, its ambiguity. Denise Platt begins the movie as a woman who has been quietly furious for a decade and has channeled it into a novel she has not told her husband about. That is a thin premise for a character, and Hathaway keeps refusing to play it thinly. She can hold fierce protectiveness and open resentment in the same expression, and she does not soften either one when the dinosaurs arrive. The catastrophe does not redeem her marriage or reveal her hidden strength; it simply removes every reason she had for being polite about the arrangement.

Christian Convery is very good as Brian, whose loud twelve-year-old bravado is transparently a costume he cannot take off in front of his father, and Maisy Stella is better still as Audrey, the one member of the family who responds to an incomprehensible event by trying to comprehend it. Her wormhole theorizing is the film’s only real concession to exposition, and Stella plays it as a teenager’s coping mechanism rather than a briefing—she is not solving the problem, she is refusing to be the kind of person who panics.

Which brings us to Greg. Ewan McGregor is not bad in the part; he is precisely as good as it allows him to be, which is the problem. Greg is the film’s argument about a certain kind of American father—the man whose optimism is a form of authority, who keeps insisting the situation is under control because admitting otherwise would mean admitting he has not had control of anything for years, including his job. That argument is correct and the film is right to make it. But the screenplay never lets him be wrong in an interesting direction. Every one of his decisions is the wrong one for the same reason, and by the second act you can predict his line readings from the blocking. When the allosaur takes his leg off in front of his wife and children, the death is horrific, and it is also the first genuinely unpredictable thing his character does.

The middle of the film is where the three and a half separates from the four. Once the neighborhood is displaced and the survivors are reduced to a handful, the picture settles into a loop: fortify the house, lose the house, cross open ground, lose someone, fortify the next house. Mitchell is clearly aware of the repetition and is using it—the whole thesis is that these people keep re-enacting the same denial in progressively smaller rooms—but there is a difference between a structure that comments on monotony and a structure that is monotonous, and for perhaps twenty minutes the film sits on the wrong side of it. Two of the neighbor characters exist entirely to be killed in the order they are introduced.

The compression hurts elsewhere too. The marriage that the ending depends on is sketched rather than built; we are told about the novel, told about the layoff, and asked to accept a decade of accumulated grievance on the strength of two conversations and Hathaway’s face. She is more than capable of carrying it, but she should not have had to. There is a version of this film at a hundred and fifteen minutes in which the last scene detonates instead of merely landing, and I suspect it existed at some point. The picture has the pace of something that has been cut for velocity by people who did not entirely trust what they had.

And the explanation, though minimal, is still slightly too much explanation. The news broadcasts about solar activity, the ripples, Audrey’s tidy account of tremors preceding the main event—none of it is obtrusive, but all of it invites the audience to start doing physics. Mitchell’s best instinct is his refusal to answer questions; every place where he half-answers one, the film gets smaller.

The ending is the reason to see it. The surviving Platts and Jeanette, an orphaned neighborhood girl, reach a portal on a rooftop and come through it into their own street twenty minutes before the displacement. Denise, having just watched her husband die, now has advance warning and a version of Greg who has not yet been eaten. She warns the neighbors. She pulls that Greg out of the house. The film cuts to two years later: a backyard barbecue, sunshine, the Platts intact and prospering, Denise’s novel published to acclaim under the title The End of Oak Street, Audrey off to college with a future in front of her.

Then the camera finds two Jeanettes at the same party, and the whole thing goes out from under you.

Because if this Jeanette is here, the other one is still back there. And if the Greg standing at the grill is the one who never went, then the Denise, the Audrey, and the Brian who fought their way across a hundred and fifty million years—who earned this—are still on the wrong side of the wormhole, and someone made a choice about which family got the yard. Mitchell holds the shot for a beat past comfortable and then goes to black. He does not explain it, does not have a character voice it, does not give you a stinger. What he gives you is a woman who wrote a bestselling book about her survival and left out the part where the survivors were left behind.

It is a genuinely nasty piece of work and it retroactively sharpens everything before it. The film has been about denial as a household technology from the first frame—the boarded windows, the muffled screaming next door, the father saying it will be fine. The coda simply reveals that the technology works. The Platts do not survive their catastrophe so much as replace themselves with a family that did not have one.

There is a real argument to be had about whether the last five minutes are enough to carry a film whose middle hour is running on fumes, and I am not certain I would win it. What I am certain of is that no other studio release this summer has anything like that final shot, or the nerve to end on it, or the discipline to make it land without a single word of explanation. Mitchell has taken a studio dinosaur picture and used it to say something genuinely unpleasant about the American family’s capacity to absorb an atrocity and repaint the house.

The End of Oak Street is frightening, beautifully composed, superbly acted by Hathaway, and structurally imperfect in ways that a slightly longer and slightly braver cut would have solved. Its monsters are indifferent and its people are not, which is the correct arrangement and the reason the film hurts. I wanted more of it, which is the best complaint I have made about a blockbuster in some time.