Some films carry with them a certain mystique.  Sometimes that mystique is universal—everyone has a sense that this movie contains something special and timeless within it.  That mystique can be magical and lighthearted; it can also be dark and unsettling.  Either way, these films stick with us, even if we haven’t seen them.  They percolate through the Zeitgeist and wedge themselves into our collective consciousness.

I’d wager that most of the films with this rare mystique are deserving of wedging “themselves into our collective consciousness.”  Donnie Darko (2001) is not one of them.

I have a bit of personal history with this film, albeit fleeting.  It released theatrically when I was a junior in high school, mere weeks after the infamous 9/11 attacks.  Indeed, because the plot involves a jet engine falling through the title character’s room, the film was caught up in the post-9/11 hysteria about depictions of airplane crashes in popular media.

I did not see it upon release.  Indeed, I didn’t really know about it.  That would change fairly quickly, as suddenly it was the film that the dark, edgy kids were talking about endlessly.

Yours portly was not one of the dark, edgy kids, but in my doughy pubescence I shared a certain affinity for these self-proclaimed outsiders, many of whom were actually well within the mainstream of early 2000s high school social circles.  Regardless, I mistakenly thought these kids were kind of cool, because they exuded a certain danger and hip insider-ism that was compelling to a morbidly obese band kid.  I also just thought that emo chicks were hot.

But I digress.  All the “cool” kids were talkin about Donnie Darko, and how amazing it was.  So in college—probably around 2004—my younger brother and his future wife and I went to the campus theater to view a screening of the flick.  For some reason the sound mix was terrible—the bass was cranked up all the way, with no highs or mids.  It was so bad, in fact, that my sickly brother became ill from the acoustic impact of the bass (anyone who has been stuck in traffic next to a car blasting hip hop at dangerous levels knows the effect well—the unsettling, jarring sensation in the pit of your stomach due to bass exposure).  I should note that the projectionist that evening was my future sister-in-law’s older brother; what he lacked in sound mixing abilities he made up for with advanced study in microbiology or the like.  Make of that what you will.

So, the first time I “saw” Donnie Darko was not a proper screening.  The dialogue was buried under the bad mix, and the film’s intentionally dark color palette seemed, at the time, to be another mistake of the projectionist, not an intentional choice of the director.  Remember, this screening was well before my repeated exposure to endless horror movies shot with intentionally dark, blue and green color finishing; I didn’t know it was supposed to look that bad.

Fast forward twenty-ish years to January 2024, when a somewhat-less-morbidly-obese Portly was flicking through Shudder for some background noise.  I saw Donnie Darko, and realized I could finally see what all the hubbub was about twenty-three years ago.  This time, I went into the movie with a great deal more skepticism—and far lesser enthusiasm—than when I persuaded my brother and future sister-in-law to the campus theater that fateful night.

Perhaps it’s the jaundiced eye of age and experience.  Perhaps it’s the realization that all those emo chicks and edgy dudes are now either a.) productive members of society with multiple kids or b.) still working menial kitchen jobs at the same chain restaurants they worked and smoked at in 2001 that allowed me to look at this flick with more objective eyes.  Whatever the case, the movie is not good.

Narratively, the whole thing is a mess, but it masquerades as a compelling story because there’s time travel and a guy in a weird bunny costume.  The story follows the title character, Donald “Donnie” Darko (portrayed by indie cinema’s favorite actor, Jake Gyllenhaal), who appears to be struggling with paranoid schizophrenia.  He sees Frank, a menacing bunny, who tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds—right after Halloween of 1988.

Donnie attends a parochial and/or private school in the tony suburbs of northern Virginia.  The students are excessively cruel to one another, and the teachers are oppressive and moralistic (sounds like real life!).  Donnie is, apparently, some kind of genius, but his mental issues and general sense of ennui constantly put him at odds with the authority figures in his life.  One teacher, Kitty Farmer, moralizes in the classic “Satanic Panic” mold and forces her students to watch cheesy motivational videos about overcoming fear.

The claustrophobia of suburban and school life is a common theme in Donnie Darko.  It’s well-tread territory in films about teenagers, and hits upon all the typical tropes—overbearing teachers and principals; the liberal sister (portrayed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the less attractive of the Gyllenhaal siblings—no homo); the stupid bullies; and the “cool,” disaffected, mentally disturbed Darko.

Donnie begins researching time travel and discovers that a local, brain-addled woman, “Grandma Death,” once wrote a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel.  Meanwhile, Donnie strikes up an awkward relationship with Gretchen, a new girl that has moved into town.

It’s the character of Gretchen that made me realize why this film had such a big impact on the moody, brooding kids of the early 2000s.  Gretchen and her mother have fled an abusive and borderline murderous father.  Gretchen’s mother goes missing at one point, and Gretchen moodily proclaims, “some people have tragedy in their blood.”

That line hit like a ton of bricks.  That kind of fatalistic, overly-Romantic sense of personal doom was all the rage among a certain kind of girl (and some guys) in the early 2000s.  I know now that pretty much anything women (of a certain variety) do is for attention, and I doubt seriously any of the girls who resonated with Gretchen really thought their lives were predestined towards doom and tragedy—but it gave them a way to get easy social credit and to appear “interesting,” which is what every boring girl wants.

Let’s face it—whether it’s being emo or thinking you’re trans, all of these boutique “identities” stem from women’s desire to make themselves a.) socially appealing to the crowd and b.) attractive to the small subset of men they want to snag (and to keep up appearances with each other; see “a”).  Gretchen saying that she has “tragedy” in her “blood” is the kind of histrionic, self-pitying rhetoric that was big in the early 2000s, a time when we were so prosperous, we had to invent problems to spice up life.

Then there’s Donnie Darko himself.  He’s portrayed as this brilliant but disaffected kid who commits flagrant acts of vandalism (flooding the school, burning the motivational speaker’s house to the ground) that are somehow justified (they find massive amounts of child p*rn in the motivational speaker’s home).  He is supposed to be Romantic and brooding and cool.

It took awhile after the film’s release, but the phenomenon of glamorizing anxiety and depression became prominent in the 2010s, and I think Donnie Darko is partially responsible.  It’s one of many films that made mental illness into a cool personality feature, not a tragic set of symptoms to be treated.  Now everyone brags about their anxiety and depression and bipolarism and transness.

Look, I’m all for having productive discussions about mental illness.  Back in my day (ha!), we didn’t discuss it much, and we didn’t know a lot about it.  You just had to bear up and carry on, unless you had some truly severe diagnosis (like schizophrenia!).  It’s probably good that we talk about ways to cope with anxiety (which I suspect is mostly just stress—and I say that as someone who takes a very small, low-dose pill for anxiety!) and depression, but it’s morphed into yet another token to display to make ourselves look hot or interesting or cool.

In the end, Donnie Darko doesn’t create anything.  He destroys quite a bit—the lives of the people around him, his school, etc.  And he’s the ostensible hero of this shuffling, meandering film.

Destruction is easy.  Actually creating something is hard—and that is interesting and hot and cool.

One coda:  despite my dislike for this film as a true adult, I did find myself wanting to get back to it during my viewing.  I had to finish it across a couple of nights, and the second night I was eager to get back to it.  It’s an odd thing—there is something compelling about Donnie Darko.  I think it could be the movie its fans claim it is.  But it’s so relentlessly focused on glorifying mentally illness and personal trauma (another overused buzzword of our excessively therapeutic age), it loses the thread of the mildly intriguing sci-fi trappings of its premise.

Anyway, go out and make something before a jet engine falls through your bedroom.  The clock is ticking.