A pleasant surprise

Rating: 8/10 (6 August 2010)

Donnie Darko is the first, and perhaps the best motion picture of the young director Richard Kelly. With an interesting cast, that includes new Hollywood faces like Noah Whyle, Drew Barrymore, the Gyllenhaal brothers, Jena Malone and Seth Rogen with more experienced artists such as Mary McDonell, Katherine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Beth Grant and Holmes Osborne, the movie was produced with a low budget and shot in a very short period of time.
Now, we have Donnie Darko: The director's cut, a DVD that includes 15 more minutes than the original film, which represents the real work Kelly and his crew did. Set in 1988, the movie narrates the story of Donnie Darko, a troubled teenager that suffers from schizophrenia. One of his hallucinations, in the form of a giant rabbit called Frank, tells him that the world will come to an end in exactly 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
This singular event is accompanied with the fact that a plane motor falls in Donnie's bed at midnight (he's saved because Frank's appearance). Since then, the facts of the history and the situations the characters are in, seem to drag them to that imminent end. Kelly shows Donnie's world, with his parents (Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonell), his sisters, his psychiatrist (Katherine Ross), his teachers and girlfriend (Jena Malone).
Donnie Darko tells a complex but well worked story. Understood in first moment as a psycho-thriller, the film combines effectively elements of comedy (with acid sarcasm), drama and science fiction. The 80's background is also greatly accurate, in its political and social context, where we can see Donnie as a teenager looking for the truth, affected by two visions of the world: one of the annoying teacher Kitty Farmer (Grant) and the hypocrite Jim Cunningham (Swayze), that represent the most conservative side of the American way of life; and the other, represented by teachers Monitoff y Pomeroy (good performances of Whyle y Barrymore), young and in-conformist characters at the school.
With outstanding and realistic special effects, a precise direction and an open final, Donnie Darko is a great surprise and an interesting and unclassified movie; a sort of gem in the American film industry: a total win for its director, who was awarded with more than 10 prizes for the film, mostly in independent film Festivals.