Donnie Darko

Somewhere in the miasma of prime American suburbia, just a short fire-truck ride away from the white picket fenced parody of Blue Velvet, dwells Donnie Darko, a magnificent, mind-fucking troubled teen fable summoned forth from the (undoubtedly) diseased and precocious genius of 26 year old first time writer/director Richard Kelly.

Set in 1988 against the bitter taste of Reagan-inspired, small-town cultural entropy, replete with ‘God is Awesome!’ T-shirts, Donnie Darko charts one October in the life of its eponymous uber-intelligent protagonist (played with impeccable tragi-comic timing by relative newcomer Gyllenhaal) who survives a freak accident when a jet engine plmmets from the sky, crashing into his bedroom.

Donnie’s world begins to bleed into a parallel universe, where Frank, a mutated and twisted echo of Harvey in a metallic bunny suit, informs Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, six hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Is Donnie suffering from paranoid schizophrenia as his shrink believes, or has he truly stumbled upon a wormhole in the space-time continuum? And will getting a girlfriend (Malone) help matters at all?

This genre-bending film is simultaneously a coming-of-age fairy-tale, a time-travel sci-fi epic, an apocalyptic re-working of Back To The Future, a scathing attack on New American Puritanism – including attendant evils such as reductive self-help culture – and a seething side-swipe at suburban mores.

Donnie Darko transforms swiftly from cute quirkiness to snarling menace, frequently within the same frame, thereby marking itself out as an inventive and remarkable film.