After a mysterious cosmic event tears Oak Street from the modern world, the Platt family find themselves stranded in the prehistoric era, with dinosaurs roaming beyond the garden fence. Greg and Denise are already struggling at home, and their children Audrey and Brian can feel the cracks forming. Then survival becomes a rather more immediate family problem.
David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, writes and directs, drawing on influences closer to The Twilight Zone, Poltergeist and Signs than a simple Jurassic Park retread. Anne Hathaway gives Denise a restless intensity, while Ewan McGregor makes Greg vulnerable and slightly overwhelmed rather than conventionally heroic. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery complete a family dynamic that feels strained before anything with teeth arrives.
Mitchell handles the escalation brilliantly. Michael Gioulakis shoots the neighbourhood with carefully controlled compositions that make everyday suburbia increasingly strange, while Michael Giacchino’s score knows when to push the spectacle and when to let the suspense breathe. The dinosaurs are impressive, but the film understands that seeing them against garages, lawns and ordinary houses is what gives the concept its personality.
The writing occasionally sacrifices logic for momentum, and some emotional beats announce themselves early. But you can feel Mitchell trying to merge character, horror, humour and blockbuster spectacle rather than simply feeding people to dinosaurs for ninety-nine minutes.
At its best, this is inventive, tense and unusually eccentric summer entertainment, with enough family drama underneath the prehistoric chaos to give the running and screaming some weight.