What is The End of Oak Street, the new David Robert Mitchell worth? (critical)
Under Spielbergian influence, the director of It Follows signs a dinosaur film which does not renew the genre and slips on the script side but remains faithful to the DNA of his cinema, symbolized by the discreet beauty of its staging.
A first release date scheduled for May 2025. Then a one-year delay until March 2026 and a new postponement until the heart of summer. A promotional campaign reduced to the strict minimum. US box office forecasts are not the funniest according to analysts. The End of Oak Street is not hitting the screens in conquered territory. A paradoxical phenomenon because, on paper, there is necessarily a real curiosity in discovering David Robert Mitchell, the director of It Follows at the helm of his first (very) big budget film (85 million dollars according to the latest estimates). And to wonder if he will get lost or, conversely, succeed in dynamiting the ultra-calibrated universe of blockbusters with his unique touch?
The answer to this question is not binary, probably firstly because this film does not come from nowhere. This son of a dinosaur enthusiast (his father has long dreamed of becoming a paleontologist) and a lifelong fan of films designed by Ray Harryhausen, has long had in mind the idea of making his dinosaur film as well as the desire – as he explained in the last issue of Première – to get rid of this image of “indie director” which sticks to him. “I wanted to expand my sandbox” he confided to us. And after three years spent writing a superhero film nipped in the bud by COVID, here is his dino film
The action takes place in 1982. La Croisière s’amuse is a hit on TV, Shake it up by Cars or More than this by Roxy music are on the radio. And life goes on seemingly peacefully in the Oak Street neighborhood where the Platt family lives. At least until this night when a mysterious cosmic event occurs which transports him entirely to a mysterious place, millennia in the past, where dinosaurs gradually take control of their streets, threatening their lives a little more every minute.
That’s it for the pitch. From there, to say that The End of Oak Street revolutionizes dinosaur films would be a lie. Produced by JJ Abrams, David Robert Mitchell fully assumes, as in Super 8, his homage to Spielberg’s cinema, tinged in addition to Fourth Dimension and Poltergeist, where the shadow of the maestro also hovers. David Robert Mitchell does not break the codes but plays with them while remaining faithful to what constitutes the DNA of his cinema. This idea of a strange event disrupting the normal life of a place as the starting point of an intrigue, exactly like in It Follows and Under the Silver Lake. And his taste for digging into the lives of his characters, often the poor relation of this type of blockbuster. Here, very quickly, we discover that everything is not as rosy as it seems with the Platts, between Greg (Ewan McGregor, decidedly too rare on the big screen) a loving and loved husband but undermined by professional worries that he tries to discreetly drown in alcohol and Denise (Anne Hathaway who follows happily after The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey), suffocating in her role as a stay-at-home mother and longing to have her own her own life, that of an author, spending her nights, also in secret, developing her first novel.
The End of Oak Stret is the polar opposite of a race for efficiency. Obviously, there are the essential chase scenes to escape the dinosaurs, action, suspense and even a dose of humor (a dino mating scene immortalized in Polaroid…). But those who set the pace are first and foremost the characters and the setting. By playing with zooms, by multiplying double focal length shots, David Robert Mitchell adopts here a style close to the cinema of the late 70s and early 80s. A staging adapted to the time in which the plot takes place but also a calm editing which lets the scenes unfold naturally. A search for naturalism in perfect contrast with the supernatural aspect of the whole
So maybe Warner didn’t expect that, maybe we had to go back and forth to achieve a result that tried to suit everyone. And perhaps also that this film will flop, failing to attract fans of blockbusters and aficionados of David Robert Mitchell, both worried about not finding what they are looking for. But a real charm, undeniably, operates. An old-fashioned film but neither old-fashioned nor outdated which nevertheless suffers from its more than uncertain management of the twists and turns and the explanations of both the phenomenon and the way out of it. Concern about scenario or editing? The stigmata no doubt from her complicated birth until her arrival in theaters.
By David Robert Mitchell. With Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella… Duration: 1h39. Released August 12, 2026
