10 Movies You Have To Watch AGAIN To Fully Understand

3. Donnie Darko (2001)

Many cult films earn their cult status via the necessity of multiple watches - and, for many, this is also why they fail to make an impact at the box office. Donnie Darko is perhaps the perfect example of this. It didn't help that the studio largely failed to advertise the feature (in no small part due to its jet engine MacGuffin and temporal proximity to 9/11) and, where it did, pitched it erroneously as a straight up horror-thriller.

On the surface of it, Donnie Darko is about a mentally ill high schooler who sleepwalks, has visions of a man-size bunny named Frank and whose miraculous escape from a grisly death has caused inexplicable ripples of doom throughout his town and reality. At least, this is what that initial watch gives you willingly.

Dig a little deeper and the film revolves around strange metaphysical events, the corruption of the fourth dimension, and time and the universe's attempts to resolve it with a tangent universe - as laid out in The Philosophy Of Time Travel by Roberta Sparrow, a book that only exists in-film. Basing the audience's comprehension around an in-movie fictional text was not the clearest thing director Richard Kelly has ever done, but he has never been one to over-explain things.

Donnie Darko is a dense, cyclical piece of filmmaking that necessitates many viewings to come to terms with. But this is not a bad thing. Each rewatch brings a new piece of the whole and even multiple interpretations.