Anne Hathaway’s Nasty Little Dinosaur Movie Is Better Than Any Jurassic Park in Years

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. About a third of the way into The End of Oak Street, there’s a scene where Audrey Platt (Maisy Stella) sneaks away from her family to have a minute to herself. Given that they’ve all been transported from 1982 to the Mesozoic era, where rampaging allosauruses and pterosaurs have torn some of their neighbors to bloody shreds, she’s understandably a little bit shaken and in need of some comfort. So she slips into the garage, quietly turns the key, and pops in a cassette of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie.” There’s no power in the past, no gasoline or batteries, so every minute she listens brings her closer to a time when the last ties to the world she knew will be gone forever, and there’s a decent chance the sound of the music might attract some sharp-toothed predator that will make a quick meal of her. But the movie doesn’t punish her need to carve a brief moment of beauty, however fleeting, out of the terrifying battle for survival her life has abruptly become. She sits behind the wheel, singing along to Winwood’s carefree hit, and we just sit with her, grabbing the chance to catch our breath. I dwell on this moment because Oak Street does, and because it’s part of what makes David Robert Mitchell’s movie stand out from the summer blockbuster field. Mitchell’s take on the family adventure is leisurely and sincere, lavishing a third of its length on the slow build to a revelation that the posters give away in an instant, and taking the possibility that Audrey’s brother Brian (Christian Convery) might get his ass kicked by a neighborhood bully as seriously as it does any dino attack. It’s also, at times, brutally blunt and darkly funny, serving up some of its grisliest deaths with tongue savagely in cheek. The Platts are a middle-class family on the verge of falling apart. Greg (Ewan McGregor) works as a pizza delivery driver to supplement the income from his regular job; Denise (Anne Hathaway) sneaks off to the basement at night to work on a novel about a woman escaping her dead-end life. They’re unhappy in the most ordinary of ways—she worries about everything, while he insists everything will work out for the best—but it’s been eating away at them for a long time, and their reserves of goodwill are nearly tapped out. They live on a suburban cul-de-sac full of happy-looking families, but perhaps their proximity to all that domestic bliss makes their attempts at pretending fall short by comparison, or maybe they just don’t know how to unite against a threat that can always be ignored for one more day. Then, well: Dinosaurs. Mitchell has access to astronomically more advanced technology than Steven Spielberg had when he made Jurassic Park more than 30 years ago, but he deploys many of the same strategies, to great cumulative effect. We hear a rumble, see a bush move, catch a glimpse of a bony ridge peeking up behind a two-story house or a reflection in a window that vanishes just before the camera comes into focus. Unlike most of Spielberg’s imitators, Mitchell remembers that the father of the modern blockbuster could be a sadist as well as a magician, tightening the screws with a giggle or playing mortality for a laugh. As much fun as The End of Oak Street is to watch in a theater, it’s even better to listen to, as the audience chuckles at a slavering monster creeping up on its victims unawares, then falls hushed as the punch line arrives. (You’ll also want to make sure you have company when Anne Hathaway whips out a rifle.) Convery (Sweet Tooth) and Stella (My Old Ass) are two of the best actors in their age bracket, and they’re particularly good at zeroing out any hint of internet-era self-consciousness. As far as they’re concerned, they might be the first people in human history to experience the emotions they’re feeling, and they take us back to a time before audiences got so pleased with spotting common tropes that they forgot how to give themselves over to a story. That might allow Mitchell to employ a few more shopworn developments than he ought to—while the characters live in 1982, we do not—but it also frees him from the compulsion to constantly wink at his audience, to signal that he’s better or smarter than the story he has chosen to tell. There are things you don’t see coming, of course, but like that swiftly approaching theropod, they’re hidden in plain sight. For a movie involving space-time wormholes and prehistoric carnivores, The End of Oak Street is surprisingly straightforward. It’s not an air-quotes throwback or a simple nostalgia piece—there’s at least one detail you would never have seen in a wide-release studio movie in 1982. But it’s the work of a filmmaker who believes that movies can take us by the hand rather than grabbing us by the shoulders, even when we’re running for our lives.