Mitchell springs his most inspired twist early on, and you should skip the rest of this paragraph if you care to experience it fresh. In short, it isn’t the dinosaurs that have come back; it’s Oak Street that has gone back. Inexplicable tremors, accompanied by haunting blips of white light, have ripped the neighborhood from its foundations and sent its homes and residents to the dawn of time, plunking them down on a landscape of smoking volcanoes, wildly overgrown jungle flora, and gargantuan theropods run amok. All this is figured out, with amusing if anticlimactic prescience, by Audrey, who’s blessed with a Carl Sagan-loving scientific mind. What she or anyone else is unable to determine is precisely why or how the space-time glitch occurred, and if Mitchell knows, he isn’t telling. He has, in his previous films, been happy to leave mysteries unsolved. In “It Follows” (2015), the specific origins of an unstoppable shape-shifting sex demon are left to the viewer’s imagination, and “Under the Silver Lake” (2019), a droll riff on L.A.-noir tropes, seemed to thumb its nose at the very idea of revelation or meaning. Such narrative caginess isn’t inherently a problem. The lack of a clear explanation for, say, the avian attacks in “The Birds” (1963) is crucial to its lasting unease and metaphorical power, and there are a few scenes here—as when Denise and Greg get trapped in a car, or when winged scavengers pick at the corpses of their freshly deceased neighbors—that function as direct homages to that Hitchcock classic.
“The End of Oak Street” is awash in such allusions. There are unmistakable flashes of Stephen King; a bully’s attack on Brian recalls the adolescent dynamics of “Stand by Me” (1986), and the vision of a neighborhood under siege, cut off from the rest of the world, evokes the supernatural entrapment of “Under the Dome.” Mostly, though, the film has been conceived as a fastidiously sun-drenched, nostalgia-rich homage to the early works of Steven Spielberg. It’s as if the raptors of “Jurassic Park” (1993) had inexplicably surfaced in the year of “E.T.” (1982), and you may flash back on that film as the sad spectre of divorce looms over the Platts, or when Brian and his buddies ride their bikes down Oak Street. The nocturnal disturbances in the neighborhood, all pulsing lights and ominous rumbles, hark back to the alien warning signs in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). And, to an impressive degree, Mitchell has brought the underwater lessons of “Jaws” (1975) ashore, using the layouts of trees and houses to conceal his prehistoric predators from view. In one shot, the spikes of a stegosaurus’s tail, poking out over a row of foliage, wittily suggest a shark’s fin breaking the surface.
It’s possible that not even Spielberg himself, coming off this summer’s highly self-referential “Disclosure Day,” could have fashioned a more totalizing monument to his legacy. “The End of Oak Street” is far from the first wink-wink pastiche that his work has inspired, and in the best of them, the power of Spielberg’s iconography dovetails with, and is sufficiently transformed by, the younger filmmaker’s independent vision. That alchemy came close to happening in the case of the alien-invasion thriller “Super 8” (2011), whose director, J. J. Abrams, is a producer on Mitchell’s movie. (The two pictures also share a composer, Michael Giacchino, who, it’s worth noting, has also scored three entries in the “Jurassic World” franchise.) Far better was Jordan Peele’s U.F.O. thriller “Nope” (2022), which succeeded in not merely mimicking Spielberg’s conventions, but weaponizing them with an uncompromising darkness that, paradoxically, became both a grand example and a ferocious critique of Hollywood spectacle.
Mitchell’s own imitation of Spielbergian life, despite its meticulous re-creation (and gleeful destruction) of eighties suburbia, stumbles into an uncanny valley between sincerity and cynicism, between unintentional comedy and deliberate homage. It wouldn’t be inapt to say that the director knows the notes but not the music—but he has orchestrations of his own, and they produce distinctly fascinating dissonances. On a certain level, it’s hard to think of a filmmaker less temperamentally suited to channelling the wonderment and uplift of early Spielberg. Mitchell is, by nature, a poet of alienation, and his earlier films—including his wistful début feature, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (2011)—have all been ruminations on the intense, often dangerous isolation of young people, even in the ostensibly supportive company of friends and lovers. In “Under the Silver Lake,” a young slacker vanishes down a conspiracy-theory rabbit hole; in “It Follows,” sex becomes a defensive weapon, wielded in a callous spirit of every person for themself.
