Barely in the double digits when the film was originally released in theatres, I discovered Donnie Darko, as many in my generation did, on the shelves of Blockbuster. I’m not sure what drew me to it: was it the moody DVD case, all brood and gloom? The comforting sight of stalwart movie stars like Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze? Perhaps it was the presence of Jake Gyllenhaal, known to me as Homer Hickam from October Sky? Whatever the reason, I eventually became obsessed with Kelly’s signature mix of paperback science-fiction plotting with strong religious overtones, and the movie’s ability to gesture at larger, unanswered mysteries that remain just out of reach captured my imagination as a budding cinephile and has yet to fully release its grip. As a 34-year-old watching it on my 4K television, I get the same chills I felt 20 years ago while watching the film on my tiny portable DVD player in the break room of the movie theatre.
Donnie Darko stands as one of the best period pieces of all time, breathing the same rarified air as the ‘70s-set Dazed and Confused—which is all the more surprising as its setting, the late 1980s, remains one of the trickiest eras to capture naturally in film and television. There are those works that go for full-era parody, as in Hot Tub Time Machine, television that treats the ‘80s as comfortable nostalgia bait, like Stranger Things, and other films that use the decade purely for stylistic points without much raison d’être, including Love Lies Bleeding. What unites these works is their self-consciousness: what they approach as cosplay, a novelty to be exploited, Donnie Darko treats as a matter of fact. It’s not trying to convince you that it’s set in the 1980s, it merely is.
One of the ways the film accomplishes this is through restraint. For a film known for its memorable soundtrack, there are a total of three non-diegetic needle drops in the film: the opening, where the titular Donnie bikes back home after waking up on the mountains to the eerie twangs of “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen; the bravura sequence featuring “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears, where we are introduced to the social ecosystem of the high school in a series of precisely choreographed long-takes; and the ending montage set to Gary Jules’ instantly iconic cover of “Mad World”, also written by Tears for Fears. By contrast, the recent Lisa Frankenstein burns three songs in the course of five minutes of screentime, with Ben Affleck’s Air being the first film fashioned entirely out of needle drops, of which there are 23.
This restraint also extends to the costume design. While dealing with budgetary constraints, the production realized that by making Donnie’s high school a Catholic academy, they could justify putting everyone in a simple uniform consisting of a white button-up and black pants and save a tremendous amount on clothes. This works in the film’s favour, allowing it to avoid any potential over-the-top depictions of 1980s fashion while reinforcing the stifling conformity that Donnie is rebelling against. And the spoken references to the era—possibly excluding an extended digression about the sexual proclivities of The Smurfs, which has aged better than every scene in every Kevin Smith movie ever—never come across as nostalgia bait, but arise naturally in conversation. Donnie references Back to the Future to his science teacher but never speaks the title, it is merely implied through the mention of a Delorean. And I doubt many teens in the early 2000s, and even less so now, knew who Maggie Gyllenhaal was referencing when she announced, in the film’s first spoken dialogue, that she was “Voting for Dukakis”.
But perhaps the chiefest pleasure of Darko is its fertile ambiguity. (The film’s closest modern counterpart, by my estimation, is this year’s I Saw The TV Glow, a ‘90s period piece conceived as an analogue for the trans experience, but whose enigmatic final stretch works just as well for viewers harbouring alternate interpretations.) This was the film that first brought me to online forums, where countless other obsessives ruminated over the breadcrumbs so tantalizingly scattered by Kelly. The predominant theory connected the dots via the film’s DVD extras, which contained selected pages of The Philosophy of Time Travel, the fictional book written by the character Grandma Death in the film. The explanation proffered—essentially that a tear in spacetime had caused the universe as we know it, The Primary Universe, to fracture off into an alternate timeline, the Tangent Universe, whose inherent instability would lead it to collapse and, in doing so, destroy all life on Earth and beyond, and that this could only be avoided by the intervention of a chosen one, the Living Receiver, Donald Duckass himself—was evocative enough, if all quite arbitrary. But the true joy was in the hunt, in witnessing the back-and-forth of fans on message boards trying to make sense of it all.
"But the true joy was in the hunt, in witnessing the back-and-forth of fans on message boards trying to make sense of it all."
Besides, it was far from the only popular interpretation. The film’s early introduction of Donnie’s psychiatric medication, implied to be antipsychotics, left room for the likelihood that he has concocted this tangent universe cosmic gumbo-jumbo in his own mind, inspired by his love of Back to the Future and Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Maybe his bunny-suited spirit guide was nothing but an elaborate hallucination, and Donnie’s resultant belief in his own significance vis à vis the fate of the universe was a typical grandiose delusion. Donnie even refers to Frank as his imaginary friend during a therapy session later in the film.
As a young Scorsese fan (also known as an Italian) who grew up Catholic, my preferred reading was of the film’s plot being a rough retelling of Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, where Donnie chooses to sacrifice himself—getting off relatively easily by being instantaneously crushed by a jet engine rather than spending six agonizing hours nailed to a cross—only after witnessing an alternate future where his survival results in the death of those closest to him (in Donnie’s case, his mother, his younger sister, his new girlfriend Gretchen, and his sister’s boyfriend Frank; in Jesus’ case Mary Magdalene). This would certainly explain the otherwise incongruous inclusion of Scorsese’s film adaptation of Temptation appearing on a cinema’s marquee in a crucial scene in Darko as part of a Halloween Frightmare Double Feature alongside Evil Dead.
Alas, Richard Kelly’s Director’s Cut flattens all these possible theories like a myriad of tangent universes collapsing into a Primary Interpretation. Aside from ruining nearly every great music cue from the original version—unbelievably cutting a song by Echo and the Bunnymen from a film featuring a 6-foot tall humanoid bunny rabbit, truly one of the great unforced errors of cinema history—the Director’s Cut takes extended lore and, for lack of a better term, makes it canon. We learn that Donnie’s medication were placebos, which Kelly has argued demonstrates that he is definitively not schizophrenic (though to me that proves nothing, except suggesting that if Donnie is mentally ill, he remains unmedicated). Most egregiously, it includes pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel onscreen as intertitles between chapters of the film. (For those Soulsborne fans reading this, imagine all the lore that Elden Ring invites you to piece together through item descriptions, dialogue, and sidequests were instead presented to you in endless expository cutscenes, and you have an idea why this choice sucks so much).
Personally, I don’t think the movie’s success is as a J.J. Abrams-style puzzle box that needs to be solved—it’s poetry. And those who believe they have solved it, like its auteur, Richard Kelly, or the nerds who run the DonnieDarko.org.uk website, who list other possible interpretations only to shut them down have, in my estimation, robbed themselves of most of the fun.
The first time I saw Darko, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending, but it made a certain emotional sense. When I was 14 in 2004, I was watching Darko—when Richard was 14, it was 1989, and he was presumably living Donnie Darko. Now, I’m sure he never saved the world by opening a wormhole in time, but the story serves as an elaborate and potent metaphor for the pains of puberty. Donnie is rebelling against an authority he is growing to suspect is evil. He is dealing with possible mental illness and feels like his mind may be working against him. He is falling in love for the first time. He is learning about scientific ideas like wormholes that are blowing his young mind. He shoots his sister’s boyfriend after the boyfriend runs over his girlfriend with a car. We’ve all been there! What teenager hasn’t felt emotions so strong that they felt like the world was going to end?
"What teenager hasn’t felt emotions so strong that they felt like the world was going to end?"
Or maybe it's none of these things. The choice is with you, the viewer. That’s why it has endured: because it is a piece of art which embraces ambiguity even if its creator disagrees. Which is a beautiful kind of ambiguity in itself, really. Kelly shared in a 2023 interview with Nick Newman at The Film Stage that he wants to re-edit Donnie Darko even further, believing he has more to say about it. “I’ll probably be talking about [Darko] for the rest of my life,” said Kelly in 2023, “unless someone just finally tells me to stop.” To that end, I humbly offer this piece.
Barely in the double digits when the film was originally released in theatres, I discovered Donnie Darko, as many in my generation did, on the shelves of Blockbuster. I’m not sure what drew me to it: was it the moody DVD case, all brood and gloom? The comforting sight of stalwart movie stars like Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze? Perhaps it was the presence of Jake Gyllenhaal, known to me as Homer Hickam from October Sky? Whatever the reason, I eventually became obsessed with Kelly’s signature mix of paperback science-fiction plotting with strong religious overtones, and the movie’s ability to gesture at larger, unanswered mysteries that remain just out of reach captured my imagination as a budding cinephile and has yet to fully release its grip. As a 34-year-old watching it on my 4K television, I get the same chills I felt 20 years ago while watching the film on my tiny portable DVD player in the break room of the movie theatre.
Donnie Darko stands as one of the best period pieces of all time, breathing the same rarified air as the ‘70s-set Dazed and Confused—which is all the more surprising as its setting, the late 1980s, remains one of the trickiest eras to capture naturally in film and television. There are those works that go for full-era parody, as in Hot Tub Time Machine, television that treats the ‘80s as comfortable nostalgia bait, like Stranger Things, and other films that use the decade purely for stylistic points without much raison d’être, including Love Lies Bleeding. What unites these works is their self-consciousness: what they approach as cosplay, a novelty to be exploited, Donnie Darko treats as a matter of fact. It’s not trying to convince you that it’s set in the 1980s, it merely is.
One of the ways the film accomplishes this is through restraint. For a film known for its memorable soundtrack, there are a total of three non-diegetic needle drops in the film: the opening, where the titular Donnie bikes back home after waking up on the mountains to the eerie twangs of “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen; the bravura sequence featuring “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears, where we are introduced to the social ecosystem of the high school in a series of precisely choreographed long-takes; and the ending montage set to Gary Jules’ instantly iconic cover of “Mad World”, also written by Tears for Fears. By contrast, the recent Lisa Frankenstein burns three songs in the course of five minutes of screentime, with Ben Affleck’s Air being the first film fashioned entirely out of needle drops, of which there are 23.
This restraint also extends to the costume design. While dealing with budgetary constraints, the production realized that by making Donnie’s high school a Catholic academy, they could justify putting everyone in a simple uniform consisting of a white button-up and black pants and save a tremendous amount on clothes. This works in the film’s favour, allowing it to avoid any potential over-the-top depictions of 1980s fashion while reinforcing the stifling conformity that Donnie is rebelling against. And the spoken references to the era—possibly excluding an extended digression about the sexual proclivities of The Smurfs, which has aged better than every scene in every Kevin Smith movie ever—never come across as nostalgia bait, but arise naturally in conversation. Donnie references Back to the Future to his science teacher but never speaks the title, it is merely implied through the mention of a Delorean. And I doubt many teens in the early 2000s, and even less so now, knew who Maggie Gyllenhaal was referencing when she announced, in the film’s first spoken dialogue, that she was “Voting for Dukakis”.
But perhaps the chiefest pleasure of Darko is its fertile ambiguity. (The film’s closest modern counterpart, by my estimation, is this year’s I Saw The TV Glow, a ‘90s period piece conceived as an analogue for the trans experience, but whose enigmatic final stretch works just as well for viewers harbouring alternate interpretations.) This was the film that first brought me to online forums, where countless other obsessives ruminated over the breadcrumbs so tantalizingly scattered by Kelly. The predominant theory connected the dots via the film’s DVD extras, which contained selected pages of The Philosophy of Time Travel, the fictional book written by the character Grandma Death in the film. The explanation proffered—essentially that a tear in spacetime had caused the universe as we know it, The Primary Universe, to fracture off into an alternate timeline, the Tangent Universe, whose inherent instability would lead it to collapse and, in doing so, destroy all life on Earth and beyond, and that this could only be avoided by the intervention of a chosen one, the Living Receiver, Donald Duckass himself—was evocative enough, if all quite arbitrary. But the true joy was in the hunt, in witnessing the back-and-forth of fans on message boards trying to make sense of it all.
"But the true joy was in the hunt, in witnessing the back-and-forth of fans on message boards trying to make sense of it all."
Besides, it was far from the only popular interpretation. The film’s early introduction of Donnie’s psychiatric medication, implied to be antipsychotics, left room for the likelihood that he has concocted this tangent universe cosmic gumbo-jumbo in his own mind, inspired by his love of Back to the Future and Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Maybe his bunny-suited spirit guide was nothing but an elaborate hallucination, and Donnie’s resultant belief in his own significance vis à vis the fate of the universe was a typical grandiose delusion. Donnie even refers to Frank as his imaginary friend during a therapy session later in the film.
As a young Scorsese fan (also known as an Italian) who grew up Catholic, my preferred reading was of the film’s plot being a rough retelling of Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, where Donnie chooses to sacrifice himself—getting off relatively easily by being instantaneously crushed by a jet engine rather than spending six agonizing hours nailed to a cross—only after witnessing an alternate future where his survival results in the death of those closest to him (in Donnie’s case, his mother, his younger sister, his new girlfriend Gretchen, and his sister’s boyfriend Frank; in Jesus’ case Mary Magdalene). This would certainly explain the otherwise incongruous inclusion of Scorsese’s film adaptation of Temptation appearing on a cinema’s marquee in a crucial scene in Darko as part of a Halloween Frightmare Double Feature alongside Evil Dead.
Alas, Richard Kelly’s Director’s Cut flattens all these possible theories like a myriad of tangent universes collapsing into a Primary Interpretation. Aside from ruining nearly every great music cue from the original version—unbelievably cutting a song by Echo and the Bunnymen from a film featuring a 6-foot tall humanoid bunny rabbit, truly one of the great unforced errors of cinema history—the Director’s Cut takes extended lore and, for lack of a better term, makes it canon. We learn that Donnie’s medication were placebos, which Kelly has argued demonstrates that he is definitively not schizophrenic (though to me that proves nothing, except suggesting that if Donnie is mentally ill, he remains unmedicated). Most egregiously, it includes pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel onscreen as intertitles between chapters of the film. (For those Soulsborne fans reading this, imagine all the lore that Elden Ring invites you to piece together through item descriptions, dialogue, and sidequests were instead presented to you in endless expository cutscenes, and you have an idea why this choice sucks so much).
Personally, I don’t think the movie’s success is as a J.J. Abrams-style puzzle box that needs to be solved—it’s poetry. And those who believe they have solved it, like its auteur, Richard Kelly, or the nerds who run the DonnieDarko.org.uk website, who list other possible interpretations only to shut them down have, in my estimation, robbed themselves of most of the fun.
The first time I saw Darko, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending, but it made a certain emotional sense. When I was 14 in 2004, I was watching Darko—when Richard was 14, it was 1989, and he was presumably living Donnie Darko. Now, I’m sure he never saved the world by opening a wormhole in time, but the story serves as an elaborate and potent metaphor for the pains of puberty. Donnie is rebelling against an authority he is growing to suspect is evil. He is dealing with possible mental illness and feels like his mind may be working against him. He is falling in love for the first time. He is learning about scientific ideas like wormholes that are blowing his young mind. He shoots his sister’s boyfriend after the boyfriend runs over his girlfriend with a car. We’ve all been there! What teenager hasn’t felt emotions so strong that they felt like the world was going to end?
"What teenager hasn’t felt emotions so strong that they felt like the world was going to end?"
Or maybe it's none of these things. The choice is with you, the viewer. That’s why it has endured: because it is a piece of art which embraces ambiguity even if its creator disagrees. Which is a beautiful kind of ambiguity in itself, really. Kelly shared in a 2023 interview with Nick Newman at The Film Stage that he wants to re-edit Donnie Darko even further, believing he has more to say about it. “I’ll probably be talking about [Darko] for the rest of my life,” said Kelly in 2023, “unless someone just finally tells me to stop.” To that end, I humbly offer this piece.