The End of Oak Street has wrapped its run in cinemas, where it opened on August 14, and from today it is available to rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV. David Robert Mitchell built the film around a single suburban street and a family under pressure, and that scale suits a smaller screen just as well as a big one.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play Denise and Greg Platt, parents trying to hold their family together after their entire neighborhood is torn loose from its ordinary 1982 existence and dropped somewhere unrecognizable and hostile. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery play their teenage kids, and the film follows the family as they work out how to survive together once the street around them stops behaving like home.
Mitchell shoots much of the family's early tension in split diopter, the deep focus technique that keeps two faces sharp in a single frame without a cut, a choice he and longtime cinematographer Mike Gioulakis clearly borrowed from Brian De Palma and the Steven Spielberg of the late seventies and early eighties. It ties the film's period setting to the genre films that period produced, right down to bicycle silhouettes that recall Amblin era Spielberg.
The End of Oak Street holds an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the reason is how much Mitchell keeps the family drama in focus even as the scale of the disaster grows around them. It reads kinder toward its characters than the cool detachment of It Follows or Under the Silver Lake, playing closer to a disaster movie than a horror one.
It suits anyone who grew up on Amblin style adventures and wants a version with real teeth, or anyone who likes a genre throwback that still cares about its people. At 100 minutes it moves quickly, built around an early disruption rather than a long patient buildup.
