The End of Oak Street (2026) Review: I Liked the Dinosaurs More Than the Story

The dinosaurs are the best part of The End of Oak Street, but the film's mystery, family drama and ending make it a frustrating experience.

*Some little spoilers ahead*

Plot

The Platt family bands together to navigate their new surroundings after a cosmic event transports their suburban neighborhood to someplace unknown.

Good points

• The dinosaurs are the clear highlight and is handled well.

• The suburban setting works really well.

• Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor work well together.

• Michael Giacchino’s score adds a lot to the sense of old-fashioned adventure and wonder.

• David Robert Mitchell’s ambition is impressive.

Bad points

• The family drama is too drawn out.

• The mystery becomes frustrating.

• Some of the dinosaur reactions don’t work at all.

• The ending is messy and feels indecisive.

• The whole movie doesn’t quite match its best moments.

My Thoughts on The End of Oak Street

The dinosaurs are absolutely the best part

There is a very simple reason I did not mind The End of Oak Street overall - the dinosaurs.

When this movie gets moving, it gets properly moving, and I am not sure I was expecting it to be quite as violent as it is either, but I was pleasantly surprised with that aspect - people get eaten, people get ripped apart, big creatures smash into things, and things get destroyed - basically, the neighborhood association meeting has gone slightly downhill here.

That side of the movie worked really well I thought, simply because the dinosaurs actually feel dangerous here, and the film isn’t constantly cutting away before something horrible happens, like some films do.

The creature variety helped a lot too, as there are raptor-like dinosaurs, flying creatures, huge predators and some enormous snake-like things, and the film also deserves credit in particular for making the dinosaurs look like animals rather than just CGI monsters, and maybe we’ve finally reached the point where Hollywood can stop making every dinosaur look like it was dipped in the same bucket of green paint.

For a movie with a reported $85 million budget, the creatures needed to look good though to be fair, and they generally do.

The dinosaur attacks are where it comes alive

The best scenes are the ones where the film just lets the creatures do what dinosaurs presumably would do if they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a bunch of suburban humans.

There is a great attack involving a huge predator and a car, and I certainly liked how physical the whole thing feels, and the larger attacks have that same quality too - a dinosaur appears, people panic, somebody makes a terrible decision, and suddenly everyone is running for their lives, and that’s the movie I wanted more of.

I also liked some of the smaller moments, especially when the film uses the houses and gardens of the neighborhood as part of the danger, because a dinosaur in a jungle is one thing, but a dinosaur wandering between houses is much more fun.

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor are doing a lot here because their characters spend a good portion of the movie being annoyed with each other.

Hathaway gives Denise plenty of frustration, while McGregor makes Greg sympathetic even when he’s being irritating, and he also brings some warmth to the character that stops the family from becoming four people screaming at each other until the dinosaurs arrive.

Maisy Stella and Christian Convery are good too, and I liked the fact that the children don’t simply disappear into the background once the adults start dealing with the bigger problems.

You believe that these people cared about each other, even when they were behaving like they desperately needed a marriage counselor and a dinosaur-free weekend.

The family drama eventually pays off

I did get pretty irritated by the amount of time the film spent on the relationship between Denise and Greg I have to say, but I also have to admit the filmmakers eventually make it worthwhile, as the point isn’t simply that they’re having marital problems, the film is using that relationship to build towards the idea that family can become more important when everything else disappears.

I still think the movie could have reached the same destination with less arguing, but the emotional payoff was fine enough because we have spent so much time seeing how badly things have gone between them, so by the later stages, their situation feels different, because survival has stripped away a lot of the smaller stuff that seemed important earlier.

It at least gave the movie some heart without completely turning it into a sentimental family advertisement, and after watching people get eaten by dinosaurs for an hour, a little emotion isn’t exactly too much of a problem.

The 1982 setting is really well done

I really enjoyed the setting too, where everything has that slightly old-fashioned suburban feel, and you can see the dedicated the whole production has made to be designed around the period, which fits David Robert Mitchell’s idea for the film because The End of Oak Street is heavily influenced by the big adventure and creature movies of that era.

The music is another big part of that - Michael Giacchino composed the score, and the movie uses it to give the film that sense of old-fashioned adventure and wonder, so the combination of the music, the suburban setting and the dinosaurs creates a very specific mood that I liked.

It feels like a movie that loves the films it grew up with, and while at times I thought it leaned too hard into that nostalgia, but mostly I liked it.

David Robert Mitchell has some good ideas, but he also loses me

David Robert Mitchell is an interesting filmmaker because It Follows showed that he could create tension without needing to throw everything at the screen, and here, he’s working on a much bigger scale.

The End of Oak Street is his third feature as writer and director, and it’s a big jump from the smaller, stranger films he’s made before, and there are times when I think that ambition works brilliantly, but then there are also times when I did not.

The biggest problem is the movie’s mystery, as I don’t mind unanswered questions., and some movies are better when they leave certain things unexplained, but here, though, the lack of answers becomes annoying because the film eventually starts relying on the rules of what happened.

I did want a little more information about what caused everything and why it happened, but the film gives you enough clues to start forming theories, then basically shrugs, which personally, I found pretty frustrating.

There are also a few moments where the actual filmmaking was annoying, such as some of the reactions to the dinosaurs don’t line up properly, and characters will be looking towards something that appears to be in one direction, then the camera changes and they’re clearly looking somewhere else.

It’s a small thing, but once you notice something like that, you can’t unsee it, and sometimes it looks like Anne Hathaway is looking at a point in the air where someone has told her, “Yep, dinosaur. About three feet to your left”.

The ending made me feel completely conflicted

The ending is where I had the biggest problem with the film, and I won’t go into all the details because this is a review rather than a transcript of the final act, but the movie takes a pretty big swing with its ending, and then it basically takes another swing.

The frustrating thing is that I actually liked the emotional idea behind it, as the emotional conclusion works, but the mechanics of getting there don’t - and apparently the ending was changed during production, with the original version intended to leave Greg’s fate much more final, but the final version does feel like it is determined to give the family a happier resolution.

A lot more heart than I expected

For all my complaints, I don’t think The End of Oak Street is a cold movie, as I do think there is a genuine affection for family running through it, and the final stretch makes that clear.

The dedication to Mitchell’s late father also gives the whole project a more personal meaning, amd his father, Robert Allen Mitchell, died in 2024, and his love of dinosaurs and classic monster movies helped inspire the film, which actually made some of the movie’s nostalgic qualities make more sense to me, and there is clearly some personal affection behind it.

I still think the movie gets carried away with that idea, but I found myself being more forgiving of some of its softer moments once the family side of the story started coming together.

Final Verdict

I liked The End of Oak Street, but I liked parts of it much more than I liked the movie as a whole.

Film Credits

Directed and written by David Robert Mitchell

Produced by J. J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, David Robert Mitchell, Matt Jackson and Tommy Harper

Starring - Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery

Cinematography by Michael Gioulakis

Edited by John Axelrad

Music by Michael Giacchino

Running time - 99 minutes

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