WARNING: This review contains spoilers for “The End of Oak Street”. Read at your own risk.
Anne Hathaway's fourth film to hit cinemas this year is one more reminder of how wide her range is. This time she plays a mother who wants to walk away from her family, but is also willing to give up everything to keep them alive. In this story, sticking together is the only way to survive.
Her character, Denise Platt, is a woman weighed down by the life she never got to live. You can see the frustration in her: the career she set aside, the person she could have been had she not started a family. She wants out, and she does not really hide it.
Denise is a writer, and the book she just finished reads a lot like her own life and her own frustrations. So when the chance came, she made sure it landed in the hands of a neighbor, the same one who had edited the books her husband wrote.
That visit turns out to be the start of everything. It is the neighbor who shows her a strange plant that had grown out of nowhere on their quiet suburban street.
Denise promises to look for answers, and at the library – this is the 1980s, so there is no Google to run to – the librarian tells her the plant went extinct long before anyone alive today was born. What Denise does not know yet is that this is only the beginning of a much bigger catastrophe.
Ewan McGregor plays Greg Platt, a father who does whatever it takes to give his family a good life, including jobs that quietly embarrassed Denise. He was delivering pizza, after all, for what he called a "part-time job."
Then there are the kids. Audrey (Maisy Stella) dreams of getting into Cornell, while her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is your typical growing boy. Both of them know their parents' marriage is falling apart, and both of them know there is nothing they can do about it.
And then there is Starbuck the dog, named after the Battlestar Galactica character, as the director shared in an interview. We will get back to him later.
The confrontation in the middle of it all is what finally brings out the truth. Greg had been taking extra hours because he had been laid off. The pizza delivery gig was not a sideline. It was the job. In her own way, Denise understood her husband. But even after the two of them made peace, Greg still ended up being eaten by a dinosaur.
Did they try to escape? They did. But there was simply no way out – or at least that was how it looked. So they did the only thing left to do, which was to stay together and survive.
Thankfully, Denise, Audrey, Brian and yes, Starbuck, make it into a portal that brings them back to the moment just minutes before the cosmic event pulls their street out of the world they know. That also means Greg gets to live again.
So everything goes back to square one for the Platt family, except for the neighbors they were not able to warn. Those people are left behind.
Denise finally gets her book out into the world, her children move on with their own lives – Audrey gets into Cornell and ends up with the love of her life – and Starbuck survives. The dinosaurs are not as lucky. The US military hunts them down, which means they go extinct for the second time.
Anne is excellent here, and her range really is one of a kind. It is the same thing we saw in her three other films that came out this year: Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey. But if we are being honest, the real star of the show is Starbuck, the family dog. You can feel the whole cinema rooting for him.
The moment Starbuck disappears, everyone in the cinema holds their breath. Everybody just wants him to make it.
For most of the film, I kept asking myself, "Where could Starbuck be?" Dinosaurs were eating other dinosaurs. Other animals were being hunted. People were being feasted on. By that point, Starbuck should have been long gone. But the film never showed us proof that he was dead, and dogs are known hunters. So when he finally came out alive, the whole cinema cheered.
Starbuck also turns out to be the hero who saves Brian from being killed by another creature, although – spoiler alert – he takes a bad fall doing it. In the end, he proves he really is man's best friend. And yes, he is the star of this film.
What makes The End of Oak Street so gripping is that you never know what is coming next. It was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the same filmmaker behind It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and produced by J.J. Abrams under his Bad Robot banner. You can tell it is an Abrams film because his fingerprints are all over it. Even then, nothing about it feels predictable, and it helps that this is not a sequel or part of a franchise. At one hour and 39 minutes, it also does not waste your time.
This is the kind of movie that makes you ask, "What in the world am I watching?" while keeping you at the edge of your seat. It leaves you wanting more action and hoping everything turns out fine. Then again, the ending is a bittersweet one. Would it not be nice if the dinosaurs also got to live somewhere, maybe at the edge of the world? But this is fiction. At least we get to see the Platt family – and Starbuck – survive.
The End of Oak Street opens in Philippine cinemas and IMAX on August 12.
-By Paolo Lim