Donnie Darko Review

A jet engine falls out of nothing into a suburban bedroom, and the film never explains it, which turns out to be its method rather than its failure. Richard Kelly's Middlesex is a very specific October in 1988, and Steven Poster shoots it in a cold blue that makes the school hallway tracking shot, set to Tears for Fears, feel like a survey of a place already half drowned.

Gyllenhaal's performance is the strange thing at the center. The smile arrives a beat late, the eyes stay flat, and he keeps Donnie legible as a sick kid rather than a prophet. The casting around him is sharp, particularly Mary McDonnell as a mother who can tell something is wrong and has no vocabulary for it, and Patrick Swayze turning his own charm into a weapon during the Jim Cunningham seminars.

The mythology is where it thins badly. The Philosophy of Time Travel business, with its artifacts and its living receiver, reads like a structure imposed after the fact to license an ending, and the satire aimed at Kitty Farmer and the self-help circuit is broad enough to belong in a dumber film, breaking into a story that was doing fine on dread alone.