On Screen: “The End of Oak Street”
The End of Oak Street
“The End of Oak Street” is — perhaps — the perfect popcorn picture to conclude the summer — an action-filled, sci-fi creature-feature.
It’s 1982 in middle-class suburbia where the Platt family is celebrating an idyllic block party with their neighbors. Frustrated Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring novelist, Greg (Ewan McGregor) earns extra money delivering pizza, while the kids — Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — romp with their feisty dog Starbuck.
That night, while Denise and Greg are engaged in serious marital bickering, a blindingly bright light, tropical wind, deafening earthquake and mysterious wormhole upend their existence.
The next morning, the cranky man next door complains about a huge pile of feces in his yard, blaming Starbuck. But then Denise notices a huge exotic flower blooming on her friend’s grass; a paleobotanist might call it primordial.
Then strange creatures suddenly appear, disappear and trample the foliage. They’re dinosaurs!
Some inexplicable space-time fluke transported Oak Street back to a prehistoric era — and suspense mounts as the Platts strive to survive dino-terror — tampering their primal fear — while they figure out how to time-travel back to the tranquility of the 20th century where they belong.
Meanwhile, Jurassic reptiles run rampant. There are huge, herbivorous Brachiosauruses — the gentle giants — along with vicious Velociraptors, Stegosauruses, an Allosaurus, the inevitable T-Rex — and the slithering Titanoboa, an enormous snake that stalks them through their own house.
“I want to remember this insane, stupid moment,” quips Denise, whipping out her Polaroid camera as Greg gamely poses in front of two massive, feathered dinosaurs fornicating against the side of a house.
Utilizing surreal, genre-blending humor and “Twilight Zone” horror, writer-director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows,” “Under the Silver Lake”) concocts a ridiculous, Amblin-Spielberg-like narrative that delves into family dynamics amid tremors, time portals and supernatural scares.
To heighten tension, Mitchell and cinematographer Michael Gioulakis often rely on split-diopter shots; that’s a visual technique using a special lens that shows both the foreground and background in sharp focus simultaneously.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “The End of Oak Street” is an absurdly entertaining 8 — playing in theaters.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.