Should You Trust This Mystery Box?
Warner Bros. is selling tickets to a movie nobody has graded. As of last weekend, the Rotten Tomatoes page for The End of Oak Street showed a Tomatometer with zero reviews counted and no audience score either. It opens wide on Friday, August 14. The scoreboard is empty, and the only verdicts in circulation come from two writers who were shown a few minutes of footage at a studio preview.
Here is what is not a secret. A cosmic event rips a suburban street out of its world and drops it somewhere with living dinosaurs, and one family has to survive it. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play the parents, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery the kids. Ninety-nine minutes, PG-13, an $85 million budget. Everything past that is being withheld on purpose, and the withholding is the pitch.
J.J. Abrams produced it, and his name on a secret-premise film is its own genre now, with a reputation problem he built himself. He gave us the phrase mystery box, arguing for years that an unopened box holds more power than anything you could put inside it. The counter-argument is simple: audiences have opened enough of these to know how often the box is empty.
The reference point people reach for is Lost, and it is not entirely fair. Abrams co-created a show that ran six seasons and piled up more questions than any finale could have closed. But fairness is not how scar tissue works. Viewers learned one lesson there and never unlearned it: a story can be thrilling for exactly as long as it withholds, and hollow the second it stops. The record, though, is more mixed than the grudge allows.
Three reasons this particular box is a better bet than the reflex suggests.
The box is already open. The marketing did not hold the question mark for long. A teaser landed in March, and by the trailer that followed in June the creatures were on screen and named: raptors, pterosaurs, an Allosaurus. Whatever is being protected now is not the premise, it is the mechanism: how a street ends up there, and whether anything ever explains it. That is a far smaller thing to get wrong. Cloverfield had to make good on a monster nobody had seen. This one already spent its reveal in a trailer and still has to be a movie afterwards, which is the healthier position.
Mitchell is the right director for this exact problem. It Follows is a horror film whose entire engine is an unexplained rule set, and it ends without explaining a thing, and it is better for it. He has proven he can close on an open question without it reading as a cheat. That is the only skill that matters here.
Ninety-nine minutes. World of Reel reported test screenings a year earlier running 100 to 105 minutes, so the cut opening Friday is tighter still. A film this short cannot stall or spend a season deferring. The third act arrives whether the script has an answer ready or not. Constraint is the best thing that can happen to a mystery.
Two outlets have now seen pieces of it. Dread Central watched fourteen minutes in July and came out describing legitimate, masterfully executed suspense. /Film watched twenty and called it a throwback in the best way, a genuinely unusual premise delivered in a fashion that is warmly recognizable. J.J. Abrams, who was in the room, called the film a people movie with monsters and was adamant that it is a family film.
All of that is real, and all of it is useless for the question you actually have. Nobody fails a mystery box in the first twenty minutes. Openings are the cheap part, and Lost had a spectacular one. Fourteen minutes of pounding suspense tells you the machine starts. It tells you nothing about how it stops.
The risk is not imaginary either. David Robert Mitchell built his name on an R-rated horror film made entirely out of dread, and this is a PG-13 August release with $85 million and a studio's four-quadrant hopes riding on it. Dread is the first thing that gets sanded off a movie in that position.
Go anyway. Buy a ticket for opening weekend, Friday the 14th or the Saturday, and walk in cold.
The case is not that this will be great. Nobody outside the production can say. The case is that the failure everyone is bracing for, the box that opens onto nothing, is the one this film is least exposed to, because it spent its reveal in the trailers and kept selling tickets anyway. Add a director who has done the hard version of this ending once, and the odds beat the flinch. Waiting also costs you the only unspoiled version of this movie there will ever be, which expires the moment somebody posts the third act as a screenshot on Saturday morning.
Two films to put on beforehand, and one to skip. Watch It Follows on Thursday night: it will remind you that Mitchell is not going to explain everything and that you should not want him to. Then 10 Cloverfield Lane, the Bad Robot box that opened onto something better than the guessing. Do not rewatch Super 8 first. It will prime you for a nostalgia film, and everything anyone has actually seen suggests this is a survival film wearing nostalgia's clothes.
