10 Movies That Were Designed To Mess With Your Head
4. Donnie Darko
In other hands, Donnie Darko would just be another movie about a depressed adolescent trying to navigate the tribulations of high school life. In the hands of Richard Kelly and Jake Gyllenhaal, it’s a haunting tale of involuntary time travel, creepy anthropomorphic rabbits, and the ultimate futility of existence.
It’s safe to say that a lot of people feel a little lost by the time Donnie Darko’s credits role, but that feeling is arguably what Kelly and co. intended for audiences. In fact, a lot of information that proved essential in fully comprehending the film’s ending was only released in the director’s cut in 2004. This version included text from The Philosophy of Time Travel, the book gifted to Donnie in the film by his science teacher.
The Philosophy of Time Travel summarizes the film’s time warp hypothesis, and explains how it affects Donnie and the people he interacts with. The majority of the film takes place in a splinter or ‘Tangent Universe’, the occupants of which are tasked with saving the original or ‘Primary Universe’.
The plane engine that crashes through Donnie’s house acts as the catalyst for this split universe, and must be sent back by Donnie in order to prevent the Primary from being destroyed. Donnie’s hallucinations of the rabbit Frank were an aid, a superhuman foresight of sorts that would help him predict the end of the world.