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 from another artist who returns to similar themes and settings: Stephen King. Both King and Spielberg often return to the grandeur and mythology of a certain era of American childhood, including the power of the first childhood crush. Early in Oak Street, we learn that the family’s youngest, Brian, harbors a crush on Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), a neighborhood girl who is seen as mysterious because, unlike all the other kids on the block, she attends private school.
A childhood crush, or a first love, is an emotionally propulsive force. Often, for the young teens at the heart of these narratives, these crushes represent their push to “become a man” — or they present these young men with a chance to step in and do something heroic to save the Girl Next Door in a bid for her affection. And they often succeed.
But not in Oak Street.
That’s because, once the family is transported to Dino Times, and the two kids encounter Jeannette out in the wild, it’s clear that Jeannette and Audrey have more of a connection than Jeannette and Brian. Audrey bandages Jeannette’s leg wound and the two share a lingering glance. In one of the movie’s funniest moments, Brian, who doesn’t seem to get the connection, interrupts his sister’s meet-cute by asking Jeannette about the intricacies of private school.
What’s most refreshing about this queer childhood storyline is probably its old-school innocent crush factor. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pooh-poohing queer fare that is sexy, such as Heated Rivalry or tragic, like Leviticus. But Mitchell’s inclusion of a queer interracial romance feels like a quiet corrective: a minor coming-out story amid a dino doomsday. We’ve watched so many facsimiles of similar childhood crushes over the years, that getting to watch two budding teenage queers show tenderness to one another felt like a minor, but important, triumph.
I won’t spoil how the movie ends, but know that the scene between Jeannette and Audrey isn’t a one-and-done, and that the film puts a fitting bow on their relationship. It’s a gender and sexuality switcheroo that works and should serve as a reminder to other directors that it’s not hard, or disingenuous, to place queer characters in fantastical settings. I mean, if you can show a (historically accurate, feathery) T-Rex, you can show a budding teen lesbian.
This story originally appeared on Them. Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s newsletters.
