No Time Like the Present

Rating: 10/10 (4 May 2003)

Richard Kelly's love letter to outsiders is eerie and finally heartbreaking. It's hard to think of anything quite like it in contemporary American cinema. There is a passing similarity to the work of Lynch, at least in the hypnotic narrative style that gives the film its sense of dislocation and alienation, but Kelly's concerns are less idiosyncratic and his work more accessible. Thematically, there's also something of the compassion found in the early work of M. Night Shyamalan (although none of the syrup of "Signs"). And the acute social observation brings to mind another extremely gifted young writer-director, James Gray ("Little Odessa").
All this in a horror film. Why not? Horror is undergoing a renaissance now that it is the most subversive of genres left in the corporatized, nerve-deadened film industry, *the* place to smuggle meaning into the movie theater. Like 2001's rather good "Session 9," "Donnie Darko" is a film that looks through and beyond its genre, knows and cares about more than its effective scares. Its technique of unsettlement also takes into its ambit the American appetite for cultish pop psychology, the savagery of our schools, the wreckage of community, and the crowbar of conformity - material that it handles with some very well-aimed satire and also a deepening, Pynchon-like paranoia. But its biggest accomplishment is the creation of Donnie himself, a Holden Caulfield to whom has been whispered the most terrible secret of all. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance is something quite special.
On the merits of this film alone, Kelly looks to be a major talent; encore!