Donnie Darko (2001)
Directed by Richard Kelly
After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.
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30 films that influenced Donnie Darko
What critics say influenced Donnie Darko
It shares with David Lynch's Eraserhead a stubbornly-what-it-is unhipness that ensures inadvertent, and possibly perennial, hipness.
With the end of the decade (or, perhaps, upon the release of David Lynch’s Eraserhead , the most durable Head film) came the subgenre’s disintegration.
The movie was made on the kind of low budget typically associated with independent films, yet the visual effects are first-rate (one in particular looks like it was lifted out of James Cameron's The Abyss ).
He tells his psychiatrist (played by Katharine Ross of "The Stepford Wives") about his strange visions, and she prescribes more drugs.
Its power soundtrack verifies Richard Kelly’s Hughes-ian aesthetic, and his stuttering steadicam shots are lifted from Martin Scorsese—one of the final shots in the film, even, is noticeably similar to the final shot of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue .
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Its temporally spiraling plot is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book transferred to the screen, influenced by music videos and tempered with a fatalistic sense of humor that makes twisted reference to other beloved Xer relics of the 80s: Donnie’s impassioned, intellectual diatribe about Smurf reproductive habits brings to mind Stand by Me’s Superman–versus–Mighty Mouse debate; Donnie and his friends racing their bikes through the dark streets of Middlesex on the night of pre-Halloween partying is nothing so much as an allusion to E.T…. and to all the subtle creepiness of what is mostly remembered as a light fantasy.
Like James Stewart's character in "Harvey" (1950), Donnie sees a rabbit that no one else can see or hear.
In a world where even the original "Alien," which director Ridley Scott proclaimed to be "the director's cut," gets a director's cut, it was only a matter of time.
The idea got its biggest boost when Scott reworked "Blade Runner" 10 years after it was mangled by the studio.
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To be fair, it's a skull-faced Easter Bunny named Frank who plants the seed of transition in Donnie's head: Donnie Darko reshapes Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books and is the first film since Edward Scissorhands to cast suburbia as Wonderland and be canny about it.
Parts of Donnie Darko, entertaining as they may be, are familiar from many other films [Rock & Roll High School (1979), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Dazed and Confused (1993), and many others] the broad caricatures of several of the adults, including the grotesquely insensitive, new-age teacher, Ms. Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), and the sleazy self-help guru she adores, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze); the slow-motion, pop-song scored steady-cam sequences introducing us to Donnie's home and high-school (the latter a real tour-de-force); the reveling in '80s culture, pop and otherwise (E.T., Faith No More, Dukakis).