Director – David Robert Mitchell – 2026 – US – Cert. 12a – 99m
Film ***
Prehistoric Beasts *****
A family in a pleasant American suburb is inexplicably transported to a prehistoric time where dinosaurs and other dangerous creatures roam – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 14h
A typical family in 1980s American suburbia. At a local community get together, Greg (Ewan McGregor) takes part in a sack race. His wife Denise (Anne Hathaway takes him aside for a serious conversation about their marriage, which she doesn’t think is working. She is also annoyed that their son Brian (Christian Convery) has bought along their dog Starbuck (played by dogs Buzz and Brisket) who has a habit of getting out of control. Denise is further frustrated when Greg bunks off to do some deliveries (it later transpires that she hates the Pizza Delivery sign he fixes to the car roof when doing his rounds.) The family also has a young teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella).
Denise pays a visit to her elderly friend Mrs. Huddleston (a striking turn form Anne Gee Byrd) who is somewhat perturbed as to the identity of the flower that has sprung up in her garden, growing to about four feet high in two days and resembling a small palm tree or yucca bearing a fruit something like an acorn about the size of a hand. So Denise pays a visit to the library, but neither any of the books there nor the librarian Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) can help her identify it.
The family have an ongoing battle with uptight neighbour Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne). Stranger is to come in the night when Brian is awoken by a strange, white light. The next day, Mel complains that the kids’ latest prank – a three foot mound of poop in his back yard, really isn’t funny. However, Brian denies any knowledge of this, and the viewer feels inclined to believe him.
There follow a series of intensely frustrating near-sightings of what might possibly be dinosaurs – an eerie animal wail here, a large tail disappearing into the undergrowth there. And then, following the sighting by dad of a peculiar shadow of a creature rummaging in bins around the back of a house, dad suddenly finds himself running for his life from a carnivorous dinosaur.
And right there, maybe 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, you effectively have the template for what is to follow. Lots of dysfunctional family dynamics which shift when the family goes into survival mode, at one point taking in bereaved local girl Jeanette Christiansen (Jordan Alexa Davis). Lots of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts, herbivores who can be a bit of a nuisance but basically get on with whatever they’re doing, and carnivores who hunt animals including humans as prey. And then the mysterious light, which turns up at various points and could well be a portal to take people back to the world as it was before any of this began.
The movie never really explains what has happened, which works rather well, leaving us with an enigma to ponder rather than a pat explanation that we don’t really believe. There are images which give us clues, though. ***Possible spoiler alert.*** A section of suburban road abruptly turns into a sheer drop, with an iconic, American, yellow school bus chopped in half (the back half is gone) as if something had suddenly sliced through the ground, scooped up a section of the town, and transplanted it to somewhere else, such as the prehistoric jungle glimpsed a the bottom of the drop. A later image suggesting an entire area of suburbia encased in a giant bubble (with echoes of The Bubble, Arch Oboler, 1966) confirms this suggestion.
The setting, time and family unit suggests classic Spielberg productions (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg; Poltergeist, Tobe Hopper, both 1982) yet the family and kids are much less engaging than in those films, as if director Mitchell (It Follows, 2014) had gone for big marquee names rather than actors who were right for the part. Worse, in dramatic terms, he doesn’t seem to know how to get the best out of his actors. I don’t mean this in terms of the cast’s interacting with dinosaurs and bubble special effects, which is peerless and utterly convincing, but in terms of straightforward drama, in which the family swiftly become irritating. We are supposed to be watching them come together in the face of dinosaur and other creature danger, but it more often feels like they come together as survivalists following a naff family drama about which the audience doesn’t really care. And I remember caring A LOT about the kids and families in bth E.T. and Poltergeist.
That said, once the film gets into dinosaur survival mode, it’s gripping stuff, with there are plenty of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures to keep dinosaur nerds glued to the screen when they appear. The beasts are never named in the film, nor (with one exception) in the press handouts, but I spotted (I think) stegosaurus, ankylosaurus, spinosaurus, allosaurus, as well as a couple of sauropods who are given a mating scene! Many of the beast have quills and / or feathers, and there’s an abundance of flying reptiles are well. Quite a few of the dinosaurs appear to be really early dinosaurs.
One of the strongest scenes involves a Titanoboa, introduced in passing earlier in the film, which appears to be a giant, legless lizard something like a Slow Worm, but enormous and carnivorous. About 4 foot radius in cross-section, it slithers silently into the family home through an upstairs window, taking its considerable bulky length through rooms, along corridors and downstairs before anyone, preoccupied with other things, notices it pass within a few feet of them. Denise finally notices it in the kitchen as it’s about to devour her, but Brian stabs its midsection somewhere upstairs which distracts it…
The other standout scene involves a constantly materialising / dematerialising bubble maybe 20 feet across in mid air into which family members must jump in order to be transported back home to before all this began. (This, incidentally, is conjecture – they don’t actually know what will happen when they enter the bubble, merely hope that they’ve guessed correctly.) Jumping into a large bubble which is forever vanishing and reappearing provides for a genuinely unnerving experience, and the sequence cleverly milks that idea for all its worth. Starbuck the dog who disappears early on in the film comes back in this scene, where he acquits himself so admirably that you wonder why the film makers didn’t use him a lot more.
If you can overlook the annoying, main, human characters, which is quite a big if, the dinosaurs and their interactions with both suburban environment and humans within those environments is largely impressive, although there are a number of occasions where odd choices are made in terms of camera placement and editing. That said, the whole thing still feels fresher and more original than the tired Jurassic World Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025). Legendary producer J.J. Abrams probably had something to do with it. Dinosaur nerds are likely to overlook Oak Street’s serious flaws, and will likely have a good time.
The End of Oak Street is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 14th.
Teaser:
Trailer: