Donnie Darko (2001)

The premise

It's October 2, 1988, in a Virginia suburb. Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled teenager who hears a voice in the night and sleepwalks outside, where he meets Frank, a figure in a monstrous rabbit costume. Frank tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie wakes up the next morning on a golf course and comes home to find that a jet engine has crashed into his bedroom. The FAA investigators can't say where it came from.

Frank keeps coming back. Donnie starts seeing a therapist, Dr. Lillian Thurman (Katharine Ross), falls for Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone), the new girl at school, and gets hooked on the idea of time travel. His science teacher, Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff (Noah Wyle), lends him The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book by Roberta Sparrow, a former teacher at the school who now lives as a recluse the local kids call "Grandma Death."

How it handles time

In the theatrical cut, the time travel is mostly a feeling of dread with a clock attached. Title cards count down the days to October 30, 1988 (Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas suggested them to Kelly when he was revising the film in 2001). Frank asks Donnie whether he believes in time travel. Monnitoff tells him it would take a metal vessel and a wormhole. And Donnie starts seeing liquid "spears" coming out of people's chests, which read as a picture of where each person is about to go. Kelly borrowed that image from John Madden's on-screen telestrator in NFL broadcasts, which is the kind of odd, specific idea the whole film is made of.

The actual rules came later. After shooting, Kelly wrote pages of The Philosophy of Time Travel that lay out a full framework, starting with the Tangent Universe, an unstable copy of our universe that can't last more than a few weeks. Those pages first appeared on the film's official website and the DVD, and only went on screen in the director's cut. Kelly has said he wrote them "as an exercise in interpretation" rather than as canon, and also, on the DVD commentary, that "this film kinda does need Cliffs Notes." You can feel the pull between those two positions every time you rewatch it.

There's a second way to watch it, too. Dr. Thurman calls Donnie's visions "daylight hallucinations," symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and Kelly has said he used that diagnosis as "a great way to ground a supernatural story." For most of its running time the film supports both readings, and that's what I like best about it. You can watch a time-travel story or a story about a teenager coming apart, and the scenes work either way.

The director's cut settles the question. It adds 20 minutes, puts the book's pages on screen as text, and swaps the opening song, "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen, for INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart," which Kelly wanted in 2001 but couldn't afford. Roger Ebert liked it more than the original (3 stars out of 4, up from 2.5) and called it "alive, original and exciting." Several later critics went the other way, and Jonathan Dean of Total Film called the on-screen pages "handholding." I'm with Dean. The director's cut is worth seeing once you know the film, but the pages answer questions I'd rather keep asking.

What works

Gyllenhaal holds the film together. Donnie has to be funny and frightening in the same scene, sometimes in the same line, and Gyllenhaal never lets one side swallow the other. The family around him feels lived in, too. Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne play his parents, and Maggie Gyllenhaal plays his older sister, Elizabeth, a casting idea that came from Jake himself.

The satire of 1988 suburbia is sharper than people remember. Patrick Swayze plays Jim Cunningham, a motivational speaker whose "attitude lessons" the gym teacher, Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), brings into the classroom. Drew Barrymore, whose company Flower Films produced the movie, plays Karen Pomeroy, the English teacher. When Kelly met Francis Ford Coppola before the film was made, Coppola singled out one of her lines as "what your whole movie's about."

It looks and sounds like nothing else from its year. Kelly and cinematographer Steven Poster shot on 35 mm in anamorphic widescreen, and for the night scenes Kelly showed the crew clips from Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) for their "burnished nostalgia." The soundtrack is full of '80s songs, from "The Killing Moon" to Duran Duran's "Notorious" at the school talent show. Michael Andrews' score gives the film its sad, quiet center, and so does his cover of "Mad World" with Gary Jules, which later spent three weeks at No. 1 in the UK and became the 2003 Christmas No. 1.

And then there's Frank. The rabbit costume was designed from Kelly's own sketches, and it has stuck around for decades longer than the film's modest box office would suggest: a Frank skin even turned up in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War in 2021.

What doesn't

The film asks a lot and gives back very little on a first viewing. The theatrical cut leaves the mechanism almost entirely unexplained, and Kelly had to keep it under two hours, so some threads (a Watership Down lesson in the English class, for one) didn't make it in. Salon's Dan Kois called the chain of events behind the plot "baroque," and that's fair. When you do look up the rules, some of the machinery feels more complicated than it needs to be.

Not every critic bought it, either. Sam Adams called it a "big mess" in City Paper when it came out. I don't agree, but I understand how someone reaches that verdict after a single watch.

Final score

Overall: 9/10. It's one of the great debut films, and its biggest flaw is that it asks more of a first viewing than most people will give it.

Paradox Meter: 3/5. The framework holds together on paper, but the theatrical cut keeps it off screen, and some of its steps only make sense if you don't ask why they were needed.

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• S. Darko (2009): the direct-to-video sequel about Samantha Darko, made without Kelly, who said in 2017 that he'd never seen it. (not on the site yet)
• Southland Tales (2006): Kelly's next film, and he says his films are "very connected." (not on the site yet)