25 Years Later, Donnie Darko Is Still Frustratingly Brilliant
Every career dies alone.
As you probably weren’t aware, director Richard Kelly is releasing a novelized sequel to Donnie Darko this December. His 600-page doorstop, dubbed The Philosophy of Time Travel, follows Donnie’s parents through a sprawling time-travel conspiracy that reaches all the way to the White House, a significant escalation of a movie that featured a tangent into the sex lives of Smurfs. Kelly envisions the book as the start of a modern Darko-verse that he hopes will include an animated adaptation and an additional live-action sequel, though it’s unclear just who will fund those films.
Donnie Darko flopped when it hit theaters 25 years ago today, but time turned it into the cult hit of the 2000s. A memorable blend of teenage alienation, predestination riddles, and sheer weirdness, it was a remarkably confident and uncompromising debut. Precocious teenagers were practically required to debate its mysteries, while critics felt Kelly had quite the career ahead of him once he sanded down his rough edges. But we’ll get to that.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie Darko, a delinquent high-school student being treated for what his psychotherapist believes is paranoid schizophrenia. As the movie opens, Donnie is lured out of his house by the hallucinatory Frank, who wears a freaky rabbit costume and warns him the world will end in 28 days. Then a jet engine slams through the bedroom Donnie just vacated, and anyone familiar with Final Destination starts to wonder whether dodging death will have consequences.
Frank’s influence over Donnie grows as Halloween approaches, but Donnie still finds time to screw around with his friends, date Jena Malone, confront bullies, interact with an eccentric local, expose a hypocritical inspirational speaker, talk about God and death with his therapist, follow the exploits of his sister’s dance troupe, and look into whether time travel is possible. Oh, and no one can figure out where that jet engine came from.
It’s a movie that doesn’t spell out its themes or explain every plot point, partly because it respects its audience and partly because even Kelly didn’t seem completely sure what he was making. Donnie Darko is strange, messy, and has a kick-ass soundtrack, all of which made it perfect for young adults starting to realize there’s more to cinema than catching Jurassic Park III and Shrek.
Donnie pushes back against reality.
Hamstrung by a lack of marketing (October 2001 was not a good time to sell a movie featuring an airline accident), Donnie Darko found a second life through foreign markets and home video. A growing fanbase debated the film’s time-travel logic and mysterious imagery on the early internet, where the film’s unusually robust promotional website offered additional information that breathless YouTubers would now call lore. It was a groundbreaking example of fervent fans producing theory after theory, eager to have their interpretation validated. Unfortunately, they got what they asked for.
Long before fans demanded the Snyder Cut, Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut hit theaters in 2004. Proof that ruthless studio bean-counters are sometimes right, The Director’s Cut superimposed pages of The Philosophy of Time Travel (a cryptic in-universe book, not the imminent sequel novel) taken from the promo site. And while the cut has its moments, sentences like “Water is the barrier element for the construction of Time Portals used as gateways between Universes at the Tangent Vortex” turn it into a lumbering slog.
If Donnie Darko helped build the digital fan theory industry, then The Director’s Cut feels like an overlong YouTube video explaining the movie in excruciating detail because it’s terrified you might, if only for a single moment, pause to form your own opinion. Learning that, for example, Donnie is a “Living Receiver” in a “Tangent Universe” doesn’t just solve the mystery, but makes you stop caring about it. Watching it with hindsight, you can see both why Donnie Darko became a sleeper hit, and why Kelly’s next two movies didn’t. Kelly seemed convinced he'd made a sci-fi movie as precisely constructed as a well-made clock, but an explanation is not a story.
Not an image that’s really improved with footnotes.
A movie can certainly be too ambiguous, but Donnie Darko enthralled because it was ambiguous. To some fans, it was a dreamy story of teenage alienation that happened to feature time travel; to others, it was a puzzle waiting to be solved. The latter made Donnie Darko a cult hit, but vivisecting a movie will kill it. Now, as creators produce bottomless buckets of lore for fans of all franchises, you get the sneaking suspicion that Richard Kelly unleashed something on us. He’s no longer making movies, but people still make Donnie Darko explainer videos and argue in the comments.
Appropriately enough, Donnie Darko now feels like an artifact that traveled through time to be with us today. You can view it as a warning about how one breakout hit doesn’t guarantee Hollywood success, as Kelly’s next movie, the confounding Southland Tales, is like watching Donnie Darko’s roughest parts be put under the spotlight for 144 minutes. But if you ignore the grim future you know is coming, Donnie Darko is still a fascinating experience. One cult hit is still more than most would-be directors get, and Kelly’s debut will keep melting artsy teenage minds for a long time to come. Just don’t expect it to make perfect sense, no matter how much supplementary material is made.
Donnie Darko is available on Plex.
