Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko

Watched on YouTube (Director's Cut)

Passed over and categorically ignored in the United States because the film could be accused of dangerous parallels to the terrorist attack of 9/11, "Donnie Darko" finally found its due fame in the home cinema release, which gradually helped it to achieve cult-like veneration, which Richard Kelly's feature film debut still carries monolithically with it today. There is no doubt that "Donnie Darko" is not a film that is compatible with the masses, but that concentrates its fascinating power on the interpretative level and mobilises it over its running time of just over 130 minutes in the director's cut to allow you a space in which you have the chance to reflect on what you have seen; in which you can withdraw with your own thoughts in order to deal with them, interpret and classify them - as long as you feel like it and your viewing habits have not yet been dulled by the hyper-transparent blockbuster machinery.

But before you get involved in the extrasensory perspective of "Donnie Darko", Richard Kelly first and foremost tells something entirely universal that invites every viewer to identify with it: Namely, a coming-of-age story in which 16-year-old Donald "Donnie" Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) serves as the main protagonist. Donnie suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is undergoing psychological treatment and is taking medication to keep his imaginary and our real reality in harmony. Relocated to the sheltered Middlesex in Virginia, a suburban idyll not reminiscent of the suburbia from David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" for nothing, you follow the boy through his world, which is not only shaken by the trials and tribulations of adolescence, but is also completely unhinged when a man-sized rabbit named Frank confronts him in a vision and prophesies the end of humanity. What you have fortunately not yet realised at this point is that "Donnie Darko" has already given vent to its time travel subject there.

The range of themes in "Donnie Darko" not only includes the sensitive coming-of-age story, which is appealing precisely because of how sensitively it deals with Donnie Darko and never intends to manoeuvre him into a pathological pigeonhole, no matter how weird or bizarre his behaviour may seem. It's also about possible parallel universes that coexist alongside our primary universe for only a temporary period of time, but could carry devastating consequences for it in their nascent implosion. The director's cut peels away this plot line much more clearly, dividing the film episodically into individual chapters that continue to be accentuated with sentences from the fictional book "The Philosophy of Time Travel". And this is where "Donnie Darko" finally starts to become truly multi-layered, because it is able to steer the figure of Donnie Darko in so many directions that behind "Donnie Darko" there may actually be a superhero film in which an outsider is entitled to the privilege of saving the human race from ruin by sacrificing and redeeming himself.

After all, it is Donnie who is suddenly empowered with psychic gifts, who could possibly travel ahead in time to give the people who otherwise only met him in his distorted dream a chance for their continued existence. In this respect, "Donnie Darko" can also be interpreted as a hauntingly deterministic passion story that deals with biblical motifs, functions under a phenomenological approach, makes film-historical references (a not exactly insignificant scene opens a portal for Donnie out of the cinema screen) and also contains a melancholy swan song to a decade in which dreams had not yet completely fizzled out, without maintaining a nostalgically transfigured gesture. "Donnie Darko" is a film that thrives and decays with the willingness of its audience; those who demand answers on a polished silver platter are advised to watch "Donnie Darko". Those who want to familiarise themselves with a picture that both challenges but also touches are at the right address. This film is an enrichment.

If you want to watch this gem, feel free to click here: youtu.be/8Qoque-nNFU

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