DONNIE DARKO

“Donnie Darko” is a horror/thriller film released on October 26, 2001 and directed by Richard Kelly and produced by Flower Films. The movie started production in 1997 right after Kelly graduated film school and had suffered a great loss in total sales due to its advertisements featuring a plane crash when the 9/11 attacks had happened just a month and a half before.

Although the movie started its making in ´97, it wasn´t until the 2000´s when producer Kelly found Pandora Cinema and Flower Films to produce and fund it with a 4.5 million dollar budget. This movie at first was a total mess that only made 500,000 dollars and took some time to create a steady fan base and finally show its true delight. It ended up making over 10 million in only US video home sales and was listed second in Empire´s “50 greatest independent films” and fifty third on “500 Greatest Movies of all Time”.

The movie is set in October 1988 and follows the struggling life of the main character, Donald Darko (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who is a young teenager struggling with schizophrenia. One day, Donnie starts to have illusions about a man in a bunny suit named “Frank”. When Frank appears in Donnies room he asks him to follow him “into the future” and proceeds to take him to a golf course nearby. Once there, they get to talking and Frank reveals to him extremely sensitive information. He tells him that the world will end in 28 days 6 hours 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Which is a very interesting date since the filming of the movie itself took 28 days.

The movie gets to this point very early in the film and is extremely good at establishing the mood as well as what is at stake. It also already shows the toxic environment in which Donnie lives and also mentions Donnies mental disorder, schizophrenia, which is so far what we think causes Donnies hallucinations. A household where there is a lot of yelling and a fried group of degenerates is all we know about the character which already lets the audience know what kind of person he is.

After Donnie talks with Frank at the golf course a loud crash wakes him up there to find out he has the timer written on his arm with a marker. He walks back to his house to find out that an airplane engine had crashed into the side of the house. Right in Donnie's room, almost as if Frank the bunny had saved him.

This has to be one of my favorite movies of all time although I do not recommend watching it with your parents…whoops. If I could describe this movie in a single word it would be “Mindf**k”. This is because it enters the whole “time traveler” trope. In fact, the movie itself is unexplainable which is something I love. The whole ending and explanation of what happened is left to the reader and there are whole communities that have stated their own theories on what happened in the movie.