The Platt family bands together to navigate their new surroundings after a cosmic event transports their suburban neighborhood to someplace unknown. (from IMDb)

I love when a movie sneaks up on you that you had previously heard nothing about and sounds awesome just from a brief description of it. Then, mix in an intriguing cast and an engaging first trailer and I'm hooked. The End of Oak Street was exactly this for me for 2026. Starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, the story takes place in 1982 when a small neighborhood mysteriously is suddenly transported back to prehistoric times... and now, cut off from civilization, a family must struggle to survive.

The End of Oak Street is a pretty unique movie. It might have a few elements or moments that could remind you of other movies, but for the most part, it feels pretty fresh. Jurassic Park: The Lost World played with the idea of a T-Rex wandering through the San Diego suburbs, while Jurassic World: Dominion imagined dinosaurs coexisting with modern man in a sloppy way. The End of Oak Street is less fantasy and more horror. Almost no one is safe from a grisly fate in this movie. It doesn't always take itself real serious, but most of it does, and it plays up on the terror more than recent Jurassic entries have. This makes the film scarier as a whole, but also far less family-friendly than the Jurassic World franchise.

I was definitely intrigued by the premise, but I wasn't really expecting to see lots of dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street. I was pleasantly surprised instead. Dinosaurs are in abundance in this film, but so is the body count. It's almost like someone had the idea of there being a zombie invasion, but substituted dinosaurs in place of the walking dead. Sure, it's not that pervasive when it comes to the dinosaurs, but it's still a lot. I'd venture to say, the amount of dinosaur mayhem we get in The End of Oak Street is pretty satisfying, when all is said and done.

While this movie does follow the Jurassic Park just-off-screen death formula pretty well, The End of Oak Street is far bloodier and more shocking than probably any of the Jurassic World franchise films. In fact, some moments are so shocking and horrifying, they're liable to stick with you long after the credits roll. There were little kids in our theater when we saw this movie, and more than just a couple moments were much too intense - or inappopriate - for them. Although it's about a family's fight for survival, The End of Oak Street is not a family movie.

The performances from Hathaway and McGregor are fantastic, and they really carry the film. Hathaway, especially, is such a strong and intense actress; she absolutely kills it here. If you ever were tempted not to believe these characters are actually living this horrifying scenario, Hathaway totally sells it. The tone of the movie is slightly inconsistent at times, however, but the weird little lighter moments mixed in do give the audience a second or two to breath. Otherwise, it's an absolute nailbiter of a movie, and one of the more suspenseful ones I've seen in quite some time. The stakes are high in the film, and it's not afraid to show that.

The content, as I said, is pretty rough. My teenage son even turned to me at one gruesome point and exclaimed (in a whisper), "How is this not R?!" And I kind of agree. It dances on the line for sure. They push the envelope on how much can be gotten away with in a PG-13 movie. They do tuck the lone use of the "F" word away toward the end of the film (for comedic effect), but there's frequent profanity throughout the movie, with over a dozen uses of the "S" word and "h*ll," as well as quite a few uses of "d*mn," and then lone uses of "*ss" and "S.O.B." There isn't any gratuitous blasphemy, but several uses of "Oh my G-d" and "Oh G-d" are used as exclamations (Not surprisingly). There's also a shocking moment, albeit played for laughs, when two characters stumble upon two brontosauruses having sex on the side of a house (with the one mounting the other from behind, complete with slow pelvic thrusts). It was completely unexpected and used to lighten the mood, but it was definitely a "What in the world?!" kind of moment for the viewer. (And that must have been an awkward one for parents of the little kids.) There's also an irritatingly random and unnecessary subplot involving the family daughter, Audrey, having feelings for a girl in their neighborhood. They introduce the neighbor, Jeannette, early in the film, with the neighborhood boys - along with Audrey's brother, Bryan - all gawking at her from afar (and talking about her having gone to private school). Of course, later in the film, almost immediately after Audrey meets, they start exchanging long glances and subtle tender moments (causing Bryan to raise an eyebrow, too), and we eventually see them holding hands together. Not only is this socially out of place for 1982, but it feels especially forced when two random girls meet and just happen to both be attracted to girls, too.

The violence, as I said, is pretty shocking and frequently bloody. While we don't usually see guts - except for a huge dead dinosaur in the background of a scene with chunks missing from its body and exposed bone - there are many bloody moments in the film. The worst is when a person is seen immediately after their leg is bitten off and then the dinosaur goes back in to finish them off. We then hear the dinosaur eating the person just off screen. The whole moment is shocking. A similar moment later on shows the bare feet of a dead person lying on a bed and we just see the feet slowly rocking back and forth on the bed as something is eating them just off screen. (We never see the gory sight.) One person is attacked on a roof by dinosaurs, but it happens in the dark and isn't especially graphic, but we see a later aerial view of the roof with no sign of the body and just blood splattered all over the shingles. A dead woman is found lying on a kitchen floor with blood around her. She's then turned over and we see a lot of blood on her neck and clothes, and bloody dino footprints tracked across the floor. There are many shots of dinosaurs biting people on the head and shoulders and dragging them away. We see little dinosaurs picking at the corpse of a cat from a distance (it's not bloody), and there's a more unsettling scene where the camera pans over numerous dead people lying in the street with varying bloody wounds on their bodies. One is seen with a dinosaur picking at their corpse behind their body, so we don't see the gory details. Other moments show blood splattered over a bathroom floor, a dead person behind the wheel of a car with blood on their head, and many other glimpses of carnage. Finally, there's a scene where a character frantically repeatedly stabs a beast (many, many times) and we see each bloody wound it makes in the creature's skin.

The spiritual attitude of the film is an odd one. They establish the new girl on the block, Jeannette, being previously from a private school, which comes up later when Audrey asks her if she believes in God. Bryan quickly says "I do!" and then Jeannette admits sometimes she doesn't, to which Audrey agrees. Also, earlier, Greg tells the family he doesn't believe God will let anything bad happen to them, which causes Denise to chastize him that he only ever goes to church on Christmas, invalidating his sunny remark. But Bryan, in that moment, supports his father and says he agrees with him. There isn't anything else spiritual in the story, but there feels like a subtle underlying theme that maybe those who believe in God are naive or foolish. It isn't said plainly, but it does feel like that's more so the attitude of the film than anything positive.

The End of Oak Street is an intense ride. I enjoyed the thriller aspects of the movie, the cast, and the dinosaurs aplenty, but it's not really the "fun" kind of thriller. While the Jurassic franchise still has a level of fun and thrill to it, The End of Oak Street goes for the jugular, so to speak, and leans heavily into the horror side of the concept. Like any rough rollercoaster ride, I left the theater a little queasy (literally), thrilled, and a little shaken up. It's definitely a surprise in more ways than one... and interested viewers may want to proceed with caution.

- John DiBiase (reviewed: 8/16/26)