Today, 25 years ago, Jake Gyllenhaal was a teen in suburban America running around, talking to a giant rabbit, trying to work out why the world was seemingly about to end. Donnie Darko was released in theaters on October 26, 2001, and it was unlike anything else around at the time. Richard Kelly’s directorial debut would become one of the defining cult movies of the early 2000s. A strange mix of sci-fi, coming-of-age drama, mystery, and dark comedy,
Gyllenhaal plays Donnie, a troubled teenager in 1988 who one night sleepwalks from his house. This is when he meets Frank, a 6-foot figure in a disturbing rabbit costume who informs him that the world will end in 28 days. Things get a lot weirder when Donnie comes home to find that somehow a jet engine has crashed through his bedroom. From there, the film plunges headlong into time travel, fate, alternate realities, and the sort of questions that can leave you staring at the credits wondering what exactly you just watched.
It Took a While for People to Figure Out What It Was
It took a while for Donnie Darko to catch on. In fact, its theatrical release was a mere weeks after 9/11, and the marketing for the film was especially difficult at the time because of its opening plane-related sequence. It had trouble finding an audience in theaters, but it eventually found a much larger one in home video and midnight screenings. That audience grew into a full-fledged cult following over the years.
In retrospect, the reasons are obvious. The movie had an unusually stacked cast for a strange little sci-fi film, with Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Mary McDonnell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and a very young Seth Rogen playing alongside Jake Gyllenhaal. It also earned Gyllenhaal one of his first major starring roles, long before Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, Nightcrawler and the rest of his career.
One of the reasons the film has such appeal is that it doesn’t explain everything. There are loads of theories as to what actually happens to Donnie, what Frank is, and how the weird timeline of the film works. Even Roger Ebert in his original review in 2001 described it as the kind of movie that the audience wants to solve, while admitting that it deliberately left a lot to chew on.
Today, Donnie Darko is rated 88% on Rotten Tomatoes by 125 critics, and it has an audience score of 80%. More importantly, it’s lived long enough to be the kind of movie that keeps getting rediscovered by new generations.
And 25 years later, Frank the rabbit is still creepy, “Mad World” still slaps, and Donnie Darko still has people arguing over what the hell really happened.
Not bad for a movie that struggled to find an audience in the first place.
