The tough, steely competence of Anne Hathaway—the sense that her characters could shoulder the weight of the world, without complaint and on short notice—has been one of the more welcome recurring spectacles of this moviegoing year. No, she couldn’t save the recent “Mother Mary,” a tedious, logorrheic folly, in which she played a pop star in serious need of a new dress, some counselling, and a much better script. But she was unsurprisingly winning in “The Devil Wears Prada 2”: Hathaway made you believe that her character, caught up in the increasingly unsustainable realms of glossy journalism and high fashion, could engineer a fairy-tale solution to a real-world problem with masterly ease. Not that the actor’s expressive powers are limited to tales of the present; as the Ithacan queen Penelope in “The Odyssey,” she polished an ancient Greek vessel to a diamond-hard Hollywood lustre. The merits of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation have been much debated, but few could deny that, in a film of extreme narrative fragmentation, Hathaway’s genuinely regal presence insured that the emotional center held.

The new, strange, and junkily diverting suburban thriller “The End of Oak Street” provides a fascinating contrast in Hathaways and means. The actress stars as a Michigan wife, mother, and aspiring writer named Denise Platt, who, unlike Penelope, seems more than ready to end her marriage. Her recently laid-off husband, Greg (Ewan McGregor), is not sailing back from Troy—the year is 1982—but proves distant in every sense; he under-parents, over-drinks, and spends most of his time out of the house. At night, Denise retreats to the basement, not to unravel her weaving but to work on a novel that paints a none-too-flattering portrait of marriage and motherhood. (She and Greg have a teen-age daughter, Audrey, played by Maisy Stella, and a pre-teen son, Brian, played by Christian Convery.) After some laborious setup, the Platt household is under siege: instead of lecherous male suitors the threat is from dinosaurs, which, through some rift in the fabric of prehistory, are suddenly stomping and chomping their way through the neighborhood.

And Denise, rather than retreating from the action, unleashes a piercing battle cry and plunges into the mayhem head on. Not right away, of course. “The End of Oak Street” moves with agreeable briskness—it runs barely a hundred minutes—but the director and screenwriter, David Robert Mitchell, knows that even full-bore dinosaur high jinks need to be rationed and modulated. When all hell does eventually break loose, though, so does Denise: she fires a rifle at an Allosaurus, fends off pterosaurs with her bare hands, and, in the film’s thrilling highlight, stabs frenziedly with a kitchen knife at a slow-rolling, scene-stealing Titanoboa. (That’s scientific nomenclature for “giant-ass snake.”) Hathaway is no stranger to action movies, but seldom have her contributions to the form been so dirt-under-the-fingernails feral. Her versatility is remarkable. You believe her when, at the dinner table with Greg and the kids—before the neighborhood has gone all Cretaceous—a sad little smile lights up her face, as if she were already mourning the end of something precious. But you believe her even more when, seeing that same family threatened, she hurls herself into the fray without a second thought. It speaks to Hathaway’s abilities that, at any given moment, everything that Denise says, does, and feels makes crystalline sense, even when everyone and everything around her seems to do the opposite.

Mitchell springs his most inspired twist early on, and you should skip the rest of this paragraph if you care to experience it fresh. In short, it isn’t the dinosaurs that have come back; it’s Oak Street that has gone back. Inexplicable tremors, accompanied by haunting blips of white light, have ripped the neighborhood from its foundations and sent its homes and residents to the dawn of time, plunking them down on a landscape of smoking volcanoes, wildly overgrown jungle flora, and gargantuan theropods run amok. All this is figured out, with amusing if anticlimactic prescience, by Audrey, who’s blessed with a Carl Sagan-loving scientific mind. What she or anyone else is unable to determine is precisely why or how the space-time glitch occurred, and if Mitchell knows, he isn’t telling. He has, in his previous films, been happy to leave mysteries unsolved. In “It Follows” (2015), the specific origins of an unstoppable shape-shifting sex demon are left to the viewer’s imagination, and “Under the Silver Lake” (2019), a droll riff on L.A.-noir tropes, seemed to thumb its nose at the very idea of revelation or meaning. Such narrative caginess isn’t inherently a problem. The lack of a clear explanation for, say, the avian attacks in “The Birds” (1963) is crucial to its lasting unease and metaphorical power, and there are a few scenes here—as when Denise and Greg get trapped in a car, or when winged scavengers pick at the corpses of their freshly deceased neighbors—that function as direct homages to that Hitchcock classic.

“The End of Oak Street” is awash in such allusions. There are unmistakable flashes of Stephen King; a bully’s attack on Brian recalls the adolescent dynamics of “Stand by Me” (1986), and the vision of a neighborhood under siege, cut off from the rest of the world, evokes the supernatural entrapment of “Under the Dome.” Mostly, though, the film has been conceived as a fastidiously sun-drenched, nostalgia-rich homage to the early works of Steven Spielberg. It’s as if the raptors of “Jurassic Park” (1993) had inexplicably surfaced in the year of “E.T.” (1982), and you may flash back on that film as the sad spectre of divorce looms over the Platts, or when Brian and his buddies ride their bikes down Oak Street. The nocturnal disturbances in the neighborhood, all pulsing lights and ominous rumbles, hark back to the alien warning signs in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). And, to an impressive degree, Mitchell has brought the underwater lessons of “Jaws” (1975) ashore, using the layouts of trees and houses to conceal his prehistoric predators from view. In one shot, the spikes of a stegosaurus’s tail, poking out over a row of foliage, wittily suggest a shark’s fin breaking the surface.

It’s possible that not even Spielberg himself, coming off this summer’s highly self-referential “Disclosure Day,” could have fashioned a more totalizing monument to his legacy. “The End of Oak Street” is far from the first wink-wink pastiche that his work has inspired, and in the best of them, the power of Spielberg’s iconography dovetails with, and is sufficiently transformed by, the younger filmmaker’s independent vision. That alchemy came close to happening in the case of the alien-invasion thriller “Super 8” (2011), whose director, J. J. Abrams, is a producer on Mitchell’s movie. (The two pictures also share a composer, Michael Giacchino, who, it’s worth noting, has also scored three entries in the “Jurassic World” franchise.) Far better was Jordan Peele’s U.F.O. thriller “Nope” (2022), which succeeded in not merely mimicking Spielberg’s conventions, but weaponizing them with an uncompromising darkness that, paradoxically, became both a grand example and a ferocious critique of Hollywood spectacle.

Mitchell’s own imitation of Spielbergian life, despite its meticulous re-creation (and gleeful destruction) of eighties suburbia, stumbles into an uncanny valley between sincerity and cynicism, between unintentional comedy and deliberate homage. It wouldn’t be inapt to say that the director knows the notes but not the music—but he has orchestrations of his own, and they produce distinctly fascinating dissonances. On a certain level, it’s hard to think of a filmmaker less temperamentally suited to channelling the wonderment and uplift of early Spielberg. Mitchell is, by nature, a poet of alienation, and his earlier films—including his wistful début feature, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (2011)—have all been ruminations on the intense, often dangerous isolation of young people, even in the ostensibly supportive company of friends and lovers. In “Under the Silver Lake,” a young slacker vanishes down a conspiracy-theory rabbit hole; in “It Follows,” sex becomes a defensive weapon, wielded in a callous spirit of every person for themself.

It’s no surprise, then, that in “The End of Oak Street,” the Platts often seem terribly alone, boxed in, and disconnected from one another, though not, with the exception of Hathaway’s scenes, in ways that achieve a deeper poignancy or suggest a deliberate satire of suburban malaise. Throughout, Mitchell seems oddly incurious about his characters and the miniature sub-dramas he doles out to them, as if he were going through a set of dramaturgical motions that he doesn’t fully believe in. Greg is a schlumpy blank, and McGregor’s performance barely begins to fill him in. Brian is a gee-whiz irritant, with a reckless attachment to the family’s conveniently recalcitrant dog and a knack for making dangerous situations worse. Promisingly, Mitchell uses the trauma and tragedy of the dinosaur attacks to plant seeds of attraction between Audrey and another neighborhood girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), but the flowering of their feelings is observed from a weirdly detached remove—a perfunctory attempt to subvert the coming-of-age conventions of an earlier era.

It’s in the nature of Hollywood movies about cataclysmic disasters to invest our sympathies in a select few—a shaken family, a clutch of survivors—and to milk queasy, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God thrills from the death and suffering of the anonymous masses. That contrast needn’t feel like hypocrisy; in the hands of an assured filmmaker—say, the Spielberg of “War of the Worlds” (2005)—the seemingly arbitrary but utterly calculated nature of who lives and dies can leave us feeling more connected to humanity, rather than less. But Spielbergian humanism and Mitchellesque alienation are an oil-and-water combo, and the upshot, even within the context of a big-budget piece of summer escapism, is a nagging callousness—an indifference to the world beyond the film’s immediate dramatic purview. Again and again, the camera, wielded by the director of photography Mike Gioulakis, glides past scenes of horror and carnage with an elegance that verges on indifference. Various neighbors are programmatically sacrificed on the altar of the Platts’ survival and the audience’s presumed pleasure. It all builds to a feel-good final twist that, when you pause to consider its ramifications, is close to appalling in its sentimental self-absorption—a reminder that the dinosaurs, for whatever terror they instill, may not be the cruellest manifestations of their maker’s imagination. ♦