Anne Hathaway protects her family from dinosaurs

The end of Oak Street begins with a sunny day of celebration, games, and quintessentially American neighborhood barbecues. An idyllic scene that all viewers will be wary of, either because they know David Robert Mitchell's previous filmography – in particular, the essential text for contemporary horror that is It follows– and they know that the filmmaker has a tendency to touch a raw nerve regarding suburban unease. Or, simply, because they have seen some of the film's posters, where a family flees from the sharp jaws of what appears to be a dinosaur. Whatever expectations one enters to see it with, the film satisfies, and modulates the horizontal pulse with which Robert Mitchell usually tightens the scope in order to bring it closer to the codes of a Hollywood entertainment that the director hesitates whether to challenge or revere.

Some celebrate that, faced with the dominance of franchises, The end of Oak Street pose a narrative original. However, one would have to ask what sense this term makes if, in the end, the proposal filters (or copies) the style guide of Spielberg and his production company Amblin, almost as if it were a remix of his motifs and achievements, and superimposes the prehistoric spectacle of Jurassic Park in the streets of single-family homes that he turned into an adventure setting in the eighties. Indeed, perhaps this is the real irony behind the film's time loop: the impossibility of American pop culture (and, by extension, society) to imagine itself in any other space than that of a mythologized past.