Donnie Darko is a 2001 American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Richard Kelly in his directorial debut, and produced by Flower Films. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle, Beth Grant, James Duval, Holmes Osborne, and Seth Rogen in his film debut. Set in October 1988, the film follows Donnie Darko (J. Gyllenhaal), a troubled teenager who inadvertently escapes a bizarre accident by sleepwalking. He has visions of Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume who informs him that the world will end in 28 days.
Development began in late 1997 when Kelly had graduated from film school and started writing scripts. He took an early idea of a jet engine falling onto a house with no one knowing its origin and built the story around it. Kelly insisted on directing the film himself and struggled to secure backing from producers until 2000, when Pandora Cinema and Barrymore's Flower Films agreed to produce it on a $4.5 million budget. Filming took 28 days in the summer of 2000, mostly in California. The soundtrack features a version of the Tears for Fears song, "Mad World" covered by American musicians Gary Jules and Michael Andrews, which went to number one on the UK Singles Chart for three weeks and was the Christmas number 1 in 2003.
Donnie Darko premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2001, followed by a limited theatrical release on October 26. Because the film's advertising featured a crashing plane and the September 11 attacks had occurred a month and a half before, it was scarcely advertised. This affected its box office performance and it grossed just $517,375 in its initial run. However, the film gained a cult following, and after reissues, it went on to gross $7.5 million worldwide, and earned more than $10 million in US home video sales. It was listed No. 2 in Empires "50 Greatest Independent Films of All Time", and No. 53 in Empires "500 Greatest Movies of All Time". Kelly released Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut in 2004. The film was adapted into a stage production in 2007 and a sequel, S. Darko, followed in 2009 without Kelly's involvement. In 2021, he announced that work on a new sequel is in progress.
Plot On October 2, 1988 in a Virginia suburb, troubled teenager Donald "Donnie" Darko sleepwalks outside, led by a mysterious voice. Once outside, he meets a figure named Frank in a monstrous rabbit costume. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie wakes up the next morning on a local golf course and returns home to discover a jet engine has crashed into his bedroom. His older sister, Elizabeth, tells him the FAA investigators do not know its origin.
Over the next several days, Donnie continues to have visions of Frank, and his parents, Eddie and Rose, send him to psychotherapist Dr. Thurman. Thurman believes Donnie is detached from reality and that his visions of Frank are "daylight hallucinations", symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia. Frank asks Donnie if he believes in time travel, and Donnie in turn asks his science teacher, Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff. Monnitoff gives Donnie The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book written by Roberta Sparrow, a former science teacher at the school who is now a seemingly senile old woman living outside of town, known to the local teenagers as Grandma Death.
Frank begins to influence Donnie's actions through his sleepwalking episodes, including causing him to flood his high school by breaking a water main, an act for which Donnie almost gets caught. Donnie later starts dating Gretchen Ross, who has recently moved into town with her mother under a new identity to escape her violent stepfather. Gym teacher Kitty Farmer begins teaching "attitude lessons" taken from local motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, but Donnie rebels against these, leading to friction between Kitty and Rose. Kitty arranges for Cunningham to speak at a school assembly, where Donnie insults him. He later finds Cunningham's wallet and address. Gretchen and Donnie go on a movie theater date, where Gretchen falls asleep and Frank reveals himself to be a teenager with his right eye hollow and bleeding. Frank then convinces Donnie to burn down Cunningham's house, which he does while Gretchen is at the theatre. Firefighters discover a hoard of child pornography at the burned remains. Cunningham is arrested, and Kitty, who wishes to testify in his defense, asks Rose to replace her as chaperone for their daughters' dance troupe on its trip to Los Angeles.
With Rose in Los Angeles and Eddie away for business, Donnie and Elizabeth hold a Halloween costume party to celebrate Elizabeth's acceptance to Harvard. At the party, Gretchen arrives distraught as her mother has gone missing, and she and Donnie have sex for the first time. When Donnie realizes that Frank's prophesied end of the world is only hours away, he takes Gretchen and two other friends to see Sparrow. Instead of Sparrow, they find two high school bullies, Seth and Ricky, who are trying to rob Sparrow's home. Donnie, Seth, and Ricky fight in the road in front of her house just as Sparrow returns home. The bullies and Donnie's two friends leave when an oncoming car runs over Gretchen, killing her. The driver turns out to be Elizabeth's boyfriend, Frank Anderson, wearing the same rabbit costume from Donnie's visions. Angered, and realizing what is happening, Donnie shoots Frank in the right eye with his father's gun and walks home carrying Gretchen's body.
Donnie returns home in the morning as a vortex forms over his house. He borrows one of his parents' cars, loads Gretchen's body into it, and drives to a nearby ridge that overlooks the town. There, he watches as the plane carrying Rose and the dance troupe home from Los Angeles gets caught in the vortex's wake, violently ripping off one of its engines and sending it back in time. Events of the previous 28 days unwind. Donnie wakes up in his bedroom, recognizes the date is October 2, and laughs as the jet engine falls into his bedroom, killing him. Around town, those whose lives Donnie would have touched wake up from troubled dreams. Gretchen rides by the Darko home the following day and learns of Donnie's death from his neighbor. Gretchen sees Rose, and the two wave at each other in a moment of déjà vu.
Cast
Production Writing The film originated in late 1997 when Kelly, aged 22, had graduated from USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles. While earning money as a client's assistant at a post-production house, he thought about his future and decided to write his first feature-length script. The task frightened Kelly at first because he did not want to produce something that was poor in quality. It was not until October 1998 when Kelly felt the time was right to write a script and wrote Donnie Darko in 28 days, the same time period as the film. The time of year influenced Kelly to set the film around Halloween.
Kelly set out to write something "ambitious, personal, and nostalgic" about the 1980s which "pushed the envelope by combining science fiction with a coming-of-age tale". The New York Times homed in on the 1980s coming-of-age story aspect by observing the influence of John Hughes, noting the "ineffectual" adults and the fact that Donnie's "suffering is a way to make him more sensitive". Kelly summarized the script was to be "an amusing and poignant recollection of suburban America in the Reagan era". He recalled a news story that he had read as a child, which he later called an urban legend, about a large piece of ice falling from the wing of a plane and crashing through a boy's bedroom, who was not there at the time and thus escaped death. Kelly used this to develop an initial idea of a jet engine falling onto a house and no one could determine its origin. He then built the rest of the script with the aim of resolving the mystery at the end while taking a "most interesting voyage" to get there, although at this point he knew the plane was to be one that Donnie's mother was on and was from a different dimension. At one point Kelly considered replacing the jet engine with a piece of ice, like he had read. He based the film's concept of time travel and alternate universes from reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Kelly was adamant about setting the film in 1988, thinking it would be fresh to explore the era and depict a society that he had not seen in a film before. Later he admitted that he felt pressured to make the setting more contemporary. However, he could not figure out how to make the story work in such a setting and retained the original setting. The first draft had Donnie originally wake up at a shopping mall, rather than a golf course. Kelly got ideas for Donnie's experiences of paranoid schizophrenia from researching the topic online. He considered such a broad disorder that is difficult to define was "a great way to ground a supernatural story" in a scientific sense. The first draft was between 145–150 pages; Kelly did not change what he had initially written as he was aware that stopping to review it would have caused him to second guess himself. He presented it to producer Sean McKittrick, who recalled he "had never read anything like this before", and helped refine the script while making the story understandable enough. After two more drafts were written, the pair finalized a 128-page script. Kelly felt that had he clarified the film's ending any further, "the film would collapse under its own pretension", and credited McKittrick, Juvonen, and Gyllenhaal, whom he said were "aggressive" and "vocal" in not letting there be one simple answer to the plot.
There are some autobiographical links with Kelly and the film; he said there is "plenty of me" in Donnie's character. Kelly grew up in Midlothian, Virginia, also a suburban town, where a local woman called Grandma Death would stand by the road and constantly open and close her mailbox. Kelly also incorporated the moment he almost ran over a homeless person while driving, arguments with his school teachers over the curriculum, and his personal experiences with sleepwalking into the narrative. The word "fuck-ass", used in the Darko family dinner scene, was something that two of Kelly's film school friends used during their occasional exchange of insults. Frank was to be a rabbit since the beginning, but Kelly was unsure whether the character originated from a dream or his longtime interest in the animal novel Watership Down by Richard Adams. The novel was to be taught in Karen's English class after the school had censored Graham Greene from her curriculum; it was a subplot that was abandoned in the theatrical version but included in the director's cut.
Development Kelly knew that the film's complicated story would be difficult to pitch to producers without a script, so he had producers read it first before discussing it with them further. While pitching the script, Kelly and McKittrick insisted that Kelly direct the film, which hindered its chances at being picked up. Kelly recalled 1999 being a year of "meeting after meeting", all of which ended in rejection, and at this point declared the film "dead". McKittrick said Donnie Darko was "the challenging script in town that everybody wanted to make, but was too afraid".