A Supernatural Coming-of-Age Story about a Psychopath

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2016)

Donnie Darko follows a boy who befriends an imaginary bunny rabbit who manipulates him into doing horrible things in the days leading up to the end of the world.
Jake Gyllenhaal has been one of my favorite actors for a while, and for good reason. His performance as Donnie is no exception. He pulls off the best performance of the film, and again manages to impress me beyond what I expected, as usual. The rest of the cast is good as well, none of them managing to reach Gyllenhaal's level. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays his older sister too, which was kind of funny and probably not a coincidence. Just saying.
The story as a whole it very interesting. The movie makes you as the audience wonder if Donnie is actually insane or has some kind of supernatural powers. Regardless of what it ends up being, it's very cool to see how it all plays out.
Donnie Darko himself is a great character. He's complicated, relatable, and just fascinating to watch. He says the things that sometimes I wish I was willing to say, and it often made me root for him, most of the time. The character of Frank is pretty great too. He's an intriguing addition to the story that adds an extra level of creepy supernatural/insanity to the story. And the costume designers really nailed it with his. He's so creepy looking, and yet the design is pretty simple, save for the mask, which is still great. On top of that Gyllenhaal and Malone have great chemistry together, so that's even another plus.
The ending is pretty great too. It leaves room for a couple of different interpretations, or at least I think it did, and it requires a little thought to fully understand, but it's not super complicated or anything either. The movie doesn't treat the audience like a bunch of idiots, yet it also doesn't expect us go to hardcore with our thinking but instead use what we learned during the actual movie to figure it out.
On occasion something would pop up that maybe I didn't like as much. Sometimes I wished certain things remained a mystery or something like that, but always each of those scenes was later proved to be done for a purpose, and thus I liked them even more.
Overall Donnie Darko is fantastic. The acting is great, the characters are realistic and interesting, the ending is thought- provoking, the story itself is riveting, and most every screw up turned out to be purposeful and only for the betterment of the film. In the end I would definitely recommend this movie.