Land of the lost: "The End of Oak Street"

The End of Oak Street presents as a prime opportunity. It arrives towards the end of a summer that has generated a lot of money for the studios, but also a dearth of original and creatively rewarding blockbusters. And amid a movie summer in which even that bedrock normie Steven Spielberg was seen to go a touch nutty in the heat (cf. Disclosure Day), it offers the season's most conventionally Spielbergian premise, being part evocation of 1980s suburbia and part dinosaur flick. As if all this wasn't enough, it's also a chance for a major studio release to finally deliver on the promise of those tepid Jurassic World reboots, which kept threatening to bring their dinosaurs ashore and into densely populated areas - as a savvier Spielberg did in 1997's The Lost World - but then... just didn't. It's not that the couple played by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor and their two-point-four children (the point four being the dog, Starbuck) don't have problems enough of their own before the dinos show up. He's been laid off and has started drinking; she's leaning in the direction of divorce; and the dog is making a terrible mess of the neighbours' gardens, although perhaps not as big a mess as some will. But then a tear in the space-time continuum - represented by some very Spielbergian flashes of light - mires this sunny block of 20th century suburban housing in prehistoric swampland, and here's where The End of Oak Street starts to get interesting. All the sub-Stand By Me/Stranger Things nostalgia of the first reel falls away, leaving behind a study of a family unit operating in near-isolation, having been cut off from the grid and left at the mercy of the law of the jungle. Somewhere in here: the kind of B-movie Rod Serling might have written had he had the misfortune to see the people and policies the America of 2026 keeps voting for.

Your actual writer-director is David Robert Mitchell, who did as much as anyone to kickstart the current horror renaissance with 2014's It Follows; the new film demonstrates that the latter was no fluke, and also that this filmmaker's head has cleared a little in the years since 2018's Under the Silver Lake. (Which may actually have been Mitchell's Disclosure Day.) From the off, you catch Mitchell working nifty split-diopter tricks within his panoramic frames: he's sly about introducing his scaly antagonists as tails and silhouettes, and he's rightly insistent in his belief that fewer VFX means better VFX (because it gives the effects houses time to finesse what they're working on). True, some of the elements he's having to marshall here are as generic as they come. There's a scene or two of Hollywood Science Talk as the family try and fathom what's just happened and how to get back to the future. The crisis allows McGregor's weak-willed paterfamilias to prove his worth, and his son (Christian Convery) to get closer to the classmate he's been crushing on. There's even a subplot about the fate of the dog. Yet I enjoyed Oak Street, in large part because it's one of the few films this summer to understand what's so tantalising and compelling about its own premise, in the same way, say, Speed or Twister did. These little boxes on a hillside become fancy packaging for the film's apex predators to tear through; it's mildly unnerving to witness the bustling, sunny suburbia of those opening scenes emptying out - or being emptied out - once the tyrannosauruses take over. Mitchell treats us to at least one image Spielberg didn't dare film in his dino movies, and keeps one or two nasty tricks up his sleeve for the home straight; this is a film operating at the upper limits of its 12A certificate. Arguably it's no more than Jumanji with bigger teeth and a softish takeback ending (partly justified by a tribute Mitchell pays amid the closing credits: it's his fantasy as much as it is that of anybody else). Yet running to a brisk 99 minutes, it's also an unusually economic example of what has come to seem like an endangered species: the purely fun summer movie, made by creatives who've devoured enough of them growing up to know what makes a good one.

The End of Oak Street opens in cinemas nationwide this Friday.