This is the best film I’ve seen this year. The movie was first recommended to me by Wiley Wiggins, who caught its debut at Sundance. I’d looked at the gorgeous donniedarko.com months ago and been intrigued, and then a couple weeks ago saw that the movie had been released on video and DVD. (I guess it played in Seattle for, like, a week last fall, but I missed it…even though I was LOOKING for it.)

I watched the video last night with Andreas and three other friends, and all but one of us were stunned and inspired as the credits rolled. One friend protested that she thought it was “freaky” and “didn’t get it,” but the rest of us were too busy discussing time, space, and airplane engines. The basic premise of the movie focuses on a troubled sleepwalking teenager circa 1988, his trans-dimensional time traveling and encounters with divine intervention. At its core, it’s science fiction, but it’s so much more…and so thought-provoking. We spend almost an hour after the movie finished talking over our theories of what had actually happened.

Here’s a much better description than I could ever hope to write:
A neurotic — possibly psychotic — teenager is clouded by mood-stabilizing drugs yet still haunted by demented visions of a giant, monstrous rabbit in this unsettling, very darkly funny bit of cerebral science fiction that plays like a comic book-y David Lynch film. Eerily vexed Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is hypnotically influenced by the rabbit, which compels him to misanthropy, capricious vandalism and worse. But as he tries to get a grip on what’s happening to him, Donnie’s delusions manifest themselves in more and more unearthly ways, including a portentous twist of temporal physics that turns his idiosyncratic world in on itself in ways that boggle the imagination. Written and directed by first-timer Richard Kelly, “Donnie Darko” is at times a little sloppy and a few characters are transparent plot devices. But it’s a brilliant mind-bender nonetheless and Gyllenhaal’s corporeal performance is completely absorbing and compellingly turbulent.

And how much did I love the cast? Patrick Swayze and a sketchy self-help guru, Drew Barrymore as a hippy English teacher, Noah Wyle explaining space and time…and don’t even get me started on Jake Gyllenhaal. Dear god.

Today I had to get some answers so I went and rented the DVD. Holy Christ. Maybe I was impressed last night, but after looking through a bunch of deleted scenes, reading a book that appears in the film, and hearing the director commentary, I am totally and completely stunned. What a fantastic piece of filmmaking.

I highly recommend renting the movie as soon as you can, and if you can’t find it at the video store, buy the DVD. The DVD is definitely the way to go on this one, because after your first viewing you WILL have questions….questions that the DVD answers perfectly.