One rabbit of the apocalypse

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2005)

'Donnie Darko' has a reputation for being a seriously strange film; but in some ways, it's undeserved. This is not just to say that it is fundamentally very conventional compared with the work of the likes of Bunel; it's actually far coherent than many mainstream science fiction thrillers (for example, 'Open My Eyes', or it's American remake, 'Vanilla Sky', which where simply praised for their "dazzling" plots); or horror films like the 'Ring' cycle. My guess is that audiences were thrown primarily because of the expectations of genre; supernatural, surreal happenings are simply not supposed to appear in what is partly a teen movie, and partly a suburban satire. As a straight film, 'Donnie Darko' isn't bad: all the sympathetic characters are unnaturally beautiful, of course, and there are the customary easy pops at educational behaviourists (to a Briton, this recurrent aspect of American teen movies is very strange, can they really be so prevalent to deserve this amount of attention?); but there's some nice dark comedy, and the acting and editing are generally of a high standard. It even manages to possess a good soundtrack using 1980s songs (in my opinion, quite an achievement in itself!). As science fiction, on the other hand, it bears some resemblance to Douglas Copeland's book, 'Girlfriend in a Coma' (and indeed, makes much more sense than that book did). What it doesn't give us is any indication of why the events we see should happen to its hero; the film may be sensible, but it's also essentially meaningless. Nonetheless, it's intelligently made, distinctive, and not really that confusing, providing you leave your preconceptions at the cinema door.