‘The End of Oak Street’ review: Cul-de-sac dino attack

The handsome couple, Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), appear to anchor a picture-perfect unit, with their well-behaved children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and a rambunctious dog, Starbuck (played by Brisket and Buzz).

By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

Because it is set in 1982 and involves an American nuclear family facing extraordinary perils, David Robert Mitchell’s new film is bound to be compared to that decade’s finest Hollywood action fare, especially Steven Spielberg’s.

But what came to mind while watching some of the vistas in “The End of Oak Street” was Hieronymus Bosch. You might as well rename the movie “The Suburbia of Earthly Delights (and Nightmares)” because of the out-there visions we discover after chaos engulfs a peaceful neighborhood.

The handsome couple, Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), appear to anchor a picture-perfect unit, with their well-behaved children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and a rambunctious dog, Starbuck (played by Brisket and Buzz). Then one night, a bright light and an earthquakelike tremor upend their world, and they wake to find exotic flora that went extinct millions of years ago and a range of prehistoric beasties. Some of them peacefully chomp on grass. Others want to chomp on anything that moves, including the Platts. We are eventually given an explanation, but it is so sparse as to be comically pro forma. The movie is not for those who require a rationale for the irrational.

In the early scenes, Mitchell, who also wrote the screenplay, economically suggests cracks in the veneer of normality. Each Platt seems to have a secret or a thwarted dream, or both, and the saddened kids overhear their parents’ constant bickering. The detached, almost surreal atmosphere in the introduction — and even, more daringly, when everything goes violently to pot — will be familiar to those who have seen Mitchell’s earlier movies, “It Follows” (2015) and “Under the Silver Lake” (2019), but also to Sofia Coppola fans.

Bosch and Coppola, the director of “The Virgin Suicides,” sound like bizarre markers when talking about a 1980s-set movie in which dinosaurs lay a suburban enclave to waste, but that collision is what makes “The End of Oak Street” distinctive. You could argue that it’s not “good” by conventional standards, but the film has a sui generis oddness that’s rare in summer popcorn productions. That quality is heightened by how hard it is to tell how much of it is intentional and how much is inadvertent.

Mitchell steers the action scenes with a sure hand, and the dino drama is on point; I wish I could scrub the visual of a particularly repugnant creature slithering about a house from my brain. In that respect, the film fulfills its brief.

“The End of Oak Street” is set in 1982

At the same time, Mitchell toys with our expectations and assumptions. When the Platts arm themselves with ad hoc objects, some of those weapons are deployed effectively, and others not so much, which slyly underlines the preposterousness of movies in which regular people magically become experts in using, say, toys as lethal weapons. And when they get in their car, Denise takes the wheel, and Greg is in the passenger seat. Not only does this swiftly shed light on their relationship, but it also underscores the mindless diktat that a male protagonist usually drives while the woman sits beside him.

On a broader canvas, there are no unnecessarily extended chases or suspenseful buildups, and nothing is padded into boring bloat. Heart-to-heart conversations are few and concise; deaths are brutal and fast. No matter the situation, the film, which has a refreshingly frugal running time, moves on quickly.

Mitchell also introduces premises or character traits, then proceeds to ignore them. Audrey, for example, is described from the start as a space nut who scrutinizes the night sky. Combining that information with a tantalizing news snippet about weird solar flares, you expect her to suss out the explanation for what’s happening and take the lead in finding a solution. But while she is somewhat helpful, the film goes in another direction in how the event changes Audrey.

Because, yes, of course, the Platts are changed by their ordeal, and in that, Mitchell abides by formula. But his matter-of-fact juxtaposition of a certain idea of the American dream with incomprehensible bedlam that defies the natural order is the film’s most interesting point. The weirdness is around us. It can also be in us. We just figure out how to live with it.

‘The End of Oak Street’

Rated PG-13 for language, bursts of violence and a particularly ghastly prehistoric monster. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. In theaters.