Donnie Darko

I first watched this movie as an 8th grader. Holy shit did I understand nothing about this movie back then. However, revisiting it four years later as a senior in high school, I’m definitely more aware of the subject matter. This movie ingeniously meshes time travel with themes of mental illness, and it makes the audience question Donnie’s sanity and whether everything we’re seeing are simply his intensifying “hallucinations.” Also, Swayze, a giant movie star, playing a douchebag pedophile is insane work that I definitely didn’t comprehend initially. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is mesmerizing, melancholy, and mysterious. Donnie’s final act of self-sacrifice to fix the original timeline is the perfect culminating moment of his character: he accepts his fate, realizing that he’d rather save his loved ones and die alone, his old worst fear, than cause the deaths of his family. This time around, I got a lot more out of the movie, and it remains at a 5/5 for me.