There is enough in the opening stretch of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street to echo the Spielbergian blockbuster: the ‘80s American suburbia, chirpy adolescents on bikes, irritable siblings at the dining table and a seemingly-happy family unit led by parents going through a marital hairpin bend of their own.Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) aspires to be a novelist and she is secretly working on something that seems borrowed heavily from her own family life. In the novel, she is considering a divorce. In real life, her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), has just been laid off. He is working as a pizza delivery person, something Denise is not very happy about. However, as much as she tries to bury her disappointment, something extraordinary happens, forcing the family to reckon with their inner cracks.After a night of fierce lightning and rain, the Platts find their neighbourhood (Oak Street) suspiciously quiet. Having lost power and water, the parents venture out to see what happened. It is only then that they realise their entire neighbourhood has been sucked through a wormhole and now lies in pre-historic times. As a result, there are dinosaurs in their backyard. Screengrab from the trailer of The End of Oak Street.“What would you do if you woke up one day, and found your backyard turned into Jurassic Park” – is a great logline for a film. And given Mitchell’s singularly quirky earlier films (It Follows, 2014; Under the Silver Lake, 2018), I would not have marked him to make such a warm crowdpleaser. In fact, one of Mitchell’s primary producers, J.J. Abrams, would be a good directorial candidate for this film, given that he had pulled off something similar with Super 8 (2011). And yet, Mitchell shows a solid grasp of the Spielbergian blockbuster, given how he uses mirror reflections to convey information, teases the suspense with a throbbing score (Michael Giacchino’s score doffs its hat to John Williams’ Jaws theme), and foregrounds primary human emotions: family, friendship and love in the midst of a sci-fi story involving dinosaurs, wormholes and time-travel.It is an important film, especially in an era where nostalgia has become a cheap trick to pander to and monetise. The End of Oak Street feels sincere and aware of the genre it is revisiting. And yet, it stands on its own two feet.The creature work feels plausible enough for us to be invested in the well-being of the Platts. A scene between Denise and Greg, where they try to come up with a strategy to survive in a town shifted to the prehistoric era, with various predators around, feels bizarre, and yet reasonable. One evening you are sharing pizza for dinner and the next morning you are stocking up on supplies and ammunition to survive not-so-benign reptiles.Screengrab from the trailer of The End of Oak Street.Two scenes capture Mitchell’s fondness for the era and his irreverence. In the first, the elder sibling Audrey (Maisy Stella) gets away from her family and goes into the car to listen to Steven Winwood’s ‘Valerie’ (which also came out in 1982). We realise Audrey’s love for the song is her longing for a woman later in the film, when she exchanges knowing glances with a female neighbour. It is a moment of stunning beauty in the midst of all the carnage and fear. In the second, the couple step out to see if a street is clear to pass through — when they chance upon two dinosaurs being visibly promiscuous with each other. It is a moment that tells you Mitchell, as much as he loves the genre, he is not precious about it so as to not mine it for a silly laugh.Hathaway, who has earlier taken chances on similarly quirky genre films (like Colossal, 2017), seems game to play both protector and predator for her children. She is reassuringly brilliant as Denise, who is mindful, generous and also justifiably fierce when the moment arrives. McGregor deftly plays Greg as someone who is pleasant to a fault, but with familiar chinks in his armour for a man in that era. Too proud in his role as a ‘provider’ to talk about his vulnerabilities with his wife. As a result, he drinks more than might be deemed reasonable. However, Greg is also always the thing standing between his family and an imminent threat.Screengrab from the trailer of The End of Oak Street.In a time when the CGI spectacle has become a film’s marketing campaign, Mitchell knows it is not the dinosaurs that matter but the family running from them. Dedicated to the director’s own father who passed away in 2024 (mentioned in the end credits), the climax and the cinematic wish-fullfilment inside it, make it all the more poignant. A good filmmaker is conscientious enough to find their personal stories amid the most generic tropes. They’re also sensible enough to know that sometimes the most straight-shooting films can also be the most joyous.*The End of Oak Street is playing in theatres