The End of Oak Street, Gregory Crewdson, and the return of the repressed
Watching this movie, I couldn't help but feel like I was on the set for one of Crewdson's photographs. In addition to the visual similarities, the parallels between the two run deeper. Both are dealing with the uncanny instability of ordinary domestic life. Just that the movie involves dinosaurs.
Without giving away too much of the plot, the 2026 film centres around the Platts; a nuclear family with two parents and two kids. However, as the opening scenes reveal, their world was already falling apart before dinosaurs appear and terrorise the neighbourhood. At the core of the film, it is a story about how a family with a house on a quiet suburban street (the so-called American dream) can teeter at the edge of destruction at any moment.
→ In this post, I want to look at how the cinematographic choices in The End of Oak Street enhance this narrative, and how they borrow heavily from the visual lexicon of the great American photographer, Gregory Crewdson.
Trailer for The End of Oak Street (2026)
There's one scene in the 2026 film, The End of Oak Street, that has stayed in my mind. Two characters are having a chat in the kitchen; they are cropped in, close and in focus. Behind them through the window, a street party is happening. But it too is perfectly in focus. Our brain and eyes don't operate that way, nor do normal film cameras. Depth of field dictates that either the foreground characters will be in focus, or the background, but not both. The resulting image feels wrong, uncanny. And that's the point.
Infinite depth of field can be seen in certain shots in the movie (top frame), whereas a viewer would normally only perceive one of the subjects in focus (bottom frames)
And this depth of field trick is also used by Crewdson in his photographs. The artist is known for his ambitious and dramatic images. He takes photographs as if he was making a movie, spending weeks if not months carefully staging the sets - only to produce one final image. He describes them as a single-frame movie.
His photos have three key features:
The physical scene, often one of ordinary domestic life - like the interior of a house, or a suburban street - but with elements that allude to a more complicated story taking place, like an abandoned car or characters in compromising positions;
Lighting, constructed using complex lighting setups and things for it to interact with, like fog, mist and water; and
As mentioned above, infinite depth of field, where everything is in focus regardless of what would happen in optical reality.
On this last point, Crewdson's photographs are extraordinarily sharp. It's a look which is achieved in post-production. He takes many negatives of the scene, maybe up to 40-50, and then stitches them together in order to compose the final image. Normally, our eyes create a hierarchy of looking by placing things in focus; but in Crewdson's images, our eye is forced to roam around the picture without this guidance. It's unsettling, creating a kind of natural anxiety.
Extract from Gregory Crewdson's Untitled (Man in Car with Shed), 1998-2002
Some films create horror by withholding information from the viewer - it's the classic 'jump scare', where the viewer is exposed to something at a moment they didn't expect it. But the opposite can work too - by showing viewers the threat before the characters in the film perceive it, it creates an intense, prolonged stress. The cinematographer of The End of Oak Street, Mike Gioulakis, explained that keeping everything in focus is a different way of creating suspense.
In contrast to Crewdson, Gioulakis largely achieved this look by using a split-field diopter, rather than by compositing two separately focused shots together. This is basically just a second, half lens placed in front of the normal cinema lens, so that two parts of the shot can remain sharp despite being at radically different distances from the camera. The telltale sign is an area of blurriness at the intersection of the two lenses (and you can see this in the second image above, around Anne Hathaway's head).
Other elements of The End of Oak Street are reminiscent of Crewdson's photographs.
Scene from the movie (left) and Crewdson's Twilight, 1998–2002 (right)
The visual language of the movie reads as an extended Crewdson set. In an earlier film, the director of The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell, said that they definitely referenced Crewdson along with other photographers. While he hasn't confirmed the same for this film, the similarities were hard for me to miss when watching it - including the setting, lighting and framing of shots. It would be hard to shoot suburban America without it looking like a Crewdson and, if anything, it's a compliment to Gioulakis that his film looks as refined as a fine art photograph.
Crewdson's America asks what if the most lonely place in the world is your own home? In the same vein as Edward Hopper, his work is concerned with isolation and brokenness in the worst way possible - the breaking of a promise, that you buy a house and have a family and that will make you happy. And that is what The End of Oak Street asks too. Except in this film, it is the return of the repressed - a psychoanalytic concept from Sigmund Freud, describing how hidden thoughts and desires, pushed out of conscious awareness in an effort to hide from them, will all eventually reappear in unintended ways.
For all of this, I love Crewdson's photographs. And - completely surprisingly - I walked away from The End of Oak Street loving it too. It contained a beautiful absurdity that I think lies at the heart of everything we hold dear.
Dinosaurs are absurd, of course. But the fear underneath them isn't. Both the film and Crewdson understand that there is something unsettling about the promises we attach to domestic life: that a house will make us safe, a family will make us whole, and the world outside can somehow be kept outside. Their work begins at the point where that promise starts to fail.
George
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