This weekend, I finally got around to seeing Donnie Darko at a midnight showing at Visions, after having missed another midnight showing in New York this summer. It’s the sort of movie that’s made for midnight showings. Visions has reviews which describe it as “what Ferris Buellerâ??s Day Off might have been if David Lynch had ever gotten his hands on it” and “Rushmore meets Twelve Monkeys,” which get the mood right, but having had time to think about it, the combination of mindbending sci-fi ideas with religious allegory evokes nothing quite so much as Phillip K. Dick.
You can watch it through at least once (which is as many times as I’ve seen it…) just for mood: this is a potent flick. During the last fifteen minutes or so, I felt my muscles clench up involuntarily, and I’m not typically all that affected by creepy movies. I’ll definitely be picking this one up in short order.
As for the plot, well, either the director was forced to cut quite a bit, or left it deliberately confusing. You leave with a rough idea of what’s going on, but there’s no way you could actually figure out what happened without going to the official site and playing the weird game hosted there. Embedded in the game is the book The Philosophy of Time Travel, referenced in the film without much detail on its contents, which gives you the extra information required to piece it together. I have to confess, that’s a strange choice, and one I’m inclined to disagree with… it’s one thing to have allusions to other texts and the like in a piece of art (Donnie Darko is packed with these as well—a movie marquee gives a hint as to what it’s all about) but I’d rather have had the answer built, however obscurely, into the film itself than hunt down a companion text that suddenly makes it all clear. Though perhaps I missed details that would have allowed me to put it together on repeat viewings. Anyway, I actually feel a bit petty carping about this given how fantastic a movie this was.
A key part of the movie’s mood, by the way, was a perfectly crafted score. The closing song is gorgeous and haunting—a cover by Gary Jules of Tears for Fears’s “Mad World.” If you don’t mind having your head infected for a while, hunt down a copy ASAP.
