Official Trailer
Rating: 0/10 | Genre: Science Fiction, Mystery, Thriller
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella, Jordan Alexa Davis
I went into The End of Oak Street with pretty low expectations, and honestly, I’m not sure that would have helped anyway. This movie is a mess, and I say that as someone who really wanted it to work.
The premise is genuinely interesting. A suburban street gets ripped out of reality and transported somewhere else. Weird sky, weird landscape, no way back. The Platt family has to figure out what’s happening and keep themselves alive. That’s a solid hook. But the execution is where everything falls apart.
Anne Hathaway plays the mother, and she’s doing her best, but the script gives her nothing to work with. There are scenes where she’s supposed to be terrified or confused, and you can see her acting the emotion instead of feeling it. Ewan McGregor is there too, but his character is so thin that I couldn’t even tell you what his job was by the end of the movie. The two younger kids, Christian Convery and Maisy Stella, actually come off better. They have better chemistry with each other, and there’s a scene where they’re exploring the altered landscape that has real tension to it.
The pacing is terrible. The first forty minutes crawl. Nothing happens. People walk around their neighborhood looking confused. Then suddenly in the middle section, things start moving faster, and you think okay, maybe this is when it gets good. But then it just stops. The third act feels like it was edited by someone who got bored.
What really bugged me was that the movie never commits to what it wants to be. Is it a mystery about the cosmic event? Is it a survival story? Is it about family trauma? It tries to be all three and ends up being none of them. There’s this whole subplot with a neighbor character that gets introduced and then abandoned. A character death happens offscreen that should have been huge but just gets mentioned in dialogue.
The visuals are fine. The cinematography of the twisted landscape doesn’t look bad. But fine cinematography can’t save a story that doesn’t know where it’s going. Some of the shots of Oak Street suspended in this void are pretty cool, but they’re not enough to carry two hours of boring setup.
I checked and this thing got a zero on TMDB, which seems harsh until you actually watch it. It’s not the worst movie ever made, but it’s the kind of movie that makes you frustrated because you can see what it could have been. There’s a good 90-minute movie buried in here somewhere, but this ain’t it.
Have you seen this one yet, or are you thinking about it? I’m genuinely curious if I’m just not the audience for it.
Where to Watch
Streaming availability varies by region. Check your favorite streaming platform to see if this title is available in your country.