Through the past, darkly

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2002)

One of the most satisfying moments in Richard Kelly's assured debut is the film's opening sequence, which is so well handled that this viewer left behind any apprehension about how a 26-year-old director would handle what turns out to be a remarkable first film.
16-year-old Donnie is a more than curious character. On the one hand assured and charming, he also suffers from emotional problems and regularly sees a psychiatrist. Fortunately, however, our hero is sleeping on a golf course at the moment a rogue airline engine plummets through his bedroom ceiling. Yet Donnie's absence is not the result of simple good fortune: he has taken to wandering the town at night, acting at the behest of Frank, an imaginary friend dressed in a nightmarish bunny suit.
Not content with saving the boy's life, Frank manipulates Donnie into flooding his own school and torching the home of a creepy motivation guru (Patrick Swayze), all the while reminding him that the world will end on October 30, 1988. Inconveniently, Donnie has recently begun a relationship with the new girl in town, who arrives with a fake identity after her step-father tries to kill her mother.
Even as his world seems to unravel about him, Donnie starts to close in on the reality that underlies his experiences. Though he can't make his family or psychiatrist understand, he is in fact sufficiently in charge of his environment to be able to manipulate space and time in the film's final act, changing the future for someone he cares about deeply.
All of which is fine, and handled in a suspenseful, gripping manner that keeps you fully engaged. However, it remains to be shown that Kelly's contorted story is ultimately explicable. Can this viewer make perfect sense of the outcome if enough intellectual effort is applied? Or are we being suckered into thinking too deeply about a tale that doesn't necessarily make sense?
Curiously, Kelly flashes up an Alfred Hitchcock quote before the opening credits, in which the great man exhorts fellow film-makers never to confuse an audience ("if they're confused, they aren't emoting"), but then sets out to prove that he can both confound and entertain his viewers, and even produce poignancy with his film's final moments. But if he ever wants to rival the master of suspense, Kelly will have to make good on his promise, and show us something solid yet extraordinary beneath his own surreal bunny suit.