Extremely good, but disturbing film

Rating: 9/10 (18 January 2006)

Having personal experience of mental illness, I found this movie both heartbreaking and brilliant. It can be difficult to capture the emotion and Jake Gyllenhaal does an awesome job. Paranoid schizophrenics can appear, to the outside world to be normal people, but with an anxiety, stress or aggression complex. Donnie Darko captures the aggressive emotions of Donnie, without generalizing that all schizophrenics have the same emotions or symptoms.
I understand that the movie is usually generalized as sci-fi, but I think that it is definitely sci-fi with a difference. For a movie that appears, at first glance, to be so 'out there' it is surprisingly real. I thought it was a brilliant movie of the struggle of a young boy trying to escape both the real world, in which he has so much trouble surviving in, and his other world, which influences him to do so much.