It's a wonderful mess.

Rating: 9/10 (9 March 2004)

There's really only one way to describe Donnie Darko - American Beauty meets Rushmore meets the Twilight Zone. The title character is a high school student who seems relatively normal on the outside - smokes, drinks, curses, yells at his family, etc. But he seems to be having trouble with perception of reality. By that I mean he sees and does the bidding of a six-foot-tall giant bunny rabbit wearing an insectoid mask. He calls him Frank. ...Right.
It's not immediately obvious what kind of movie this is going to be, and to be honest, I'm still trying to decide myself. It's part teen drama, part psychological thriller, part time travel sci-fi movie, and part horror flick. There are times when the elements gel cohesively and form a whole that touches greatness, and other times it devolves into insanity of a David Lynch vein. Jake Gyllenhaal gives a marvelous performance, alternately creepy, sympathetic, funny, and odd, but it's really more of a filmed representation of Richard Kelly's dark dreams than anything else, so the acting becomes secondary to the atmosphere and ideas being put forth. I loved it, though, in spite of its flaws, and everybody I know either loves it or despises it. Seems to be one of those moves that polarizes people's opinions. Give it a try if you're in the mood for something very, VERY different.