The Surprising Queer Story in The End of Oak Street Puts a Perfect Bow on the Dino Thriller

Spoiler alert: This essay contains spoilers for The End of Oak Street. Childhood crushes are an enduring cinematic staple and The End of Oak Street is no different. But this time, it’s queer.For those who have yet to see the dino-fighting thriller, the premise is simultaneously high concept but simple. It’s the early 1980s — so early that the fashion is still very much 1970s-inspired — and aspiring novelist Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) lives in a picturesque American suburb with her out-of-a-job husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) and their two kids. Audrey (Maisy Stella) is an aspiring astronomer and Brian (Christian Convery) is an amateur archer. And no nuclear family would be complete without their dog, Starbuck. After a series of flashing lights shine in the sky, odd phenomena begin to appear in the neighborhood, including a prehistoric plant and a 100-pound pile of manure. Then, one evening, the lights transport the entire neighborhood into dinosaur times, leaving the Platts to survive their new several-ton neighbors and sweltering climate.Oak Street is most definitely a genre-fluid affair, melding horror sequences with some gut-busting laughs, including Hathaway stifling a guffaw watching two dinosaurs getting freaky with it. But more than any traditional genre, the film is most decidedly a Spielberg Movie — even if it’s helmed by It Follows director David Robert Mitchell. The suburban setting, latchkey kid main characters, and sense of small-town people being caught up in larger-than-life sequences all recall some of the director’s most defining fare, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial and Jurassic Park. (More than a handful of reviewers have pointed out the film’s Spielbergian bent and even compared it favorably to the famous director’s Disclosure Day, which came out earlier this year and felt like many to be a major disappointment.)But while the film is Spielbergian in tone and genre, it also borrows heavily fr