This is the opening title, already showing a bit of the color scheme and mood, which is mostly dark colors and blue tones.
In this opening scene, Donnie wakes up on the road, looking confused. This is foreshadowing the bouts of sleepwalking throughout the movie.
One morning, Donnie wakes up on a golf course with these numbers written on his arm. During the night, he had followed Frank the bunny, who told him there are 28 days left until the end of the world.
A jet engine gets lifted after falling into Donnie’s bedroom during the night when he was gone on the golf course.
Frank influences Donnie to commit crimes, but when Donniedoes this he is not really in his right state of mind. In this specific scene, the police and his school’s administration find that the school has been flooded (by Donnie, but they don’t know that).
In this scene, Frank appears in Donnie’s bathroom and he tries to stab him in the eye, but there is a strange forcefield between them.
While there is some kind of barrier between Frank and Donnie, the eye that Donnie is attempting to stab starts to glow. Frank’s right eye being damaged is something that comes up later in the movie.
One night when Donnie takes his girlfriend Gretchen to the movies,Frank shows up and Donnie asks when this will all stop. Frank then tells Donnie to look at the movie screen, and it shows the house of a rich man in town, which he then tells Donnie to burn down.
In this scene, Donnie is visiting his psychiatrist for the last time. This is shortly after she breaks to his parents that he is a paranoid schizophrenic.
In this scene, Frank shows up during one of Donnie’s therapy session, which freaks him out. His psychiatrist, who is bad at her job, thinks he must be to far gone to be helped, and she tells him the pills she has been giving him are placebos and he can stop taking them.
Donnie starts to see what is called an “intention energy beam”, which allows him to see the future in a way. It is a predetermined path, referring to fate. The director got this idea from the CBS chalkboard used in the NFL, where sportscasters would talk about plays and show the way a player was going to move by drawing arrows.
This scene is very close to the end. It shows Donnie on the same hill from first scene of the movie, where he is now watching a portal open up over his house. At this point, he has to make a big decision on whether he wants to sacrifice himself to stop the end of the world.
Donnie Darko, titled after the main character, is about a schizofrenic teenager who is told by a man in a bunny suit that the world is going to end. He does not really give an explanation, but we start to see that Donnie feels a responsibility to prevent this from happening, since he is the only one that knows about it.
The opening scene shows Donnie waking up by the side of a road on a hill next to his bike. We soon find out that Donnie has been having problems with sleepwalking, so it doesn’t seem to confuse him that much. He rides his bike home, and then it skips to later in the day where we see Donnie having dinner with his parents and two sisters. It doesn’t take long for him and his older sister Elizabeth to start arguing, and she blurts out that Donnie hasn’t been taking his medication. It is clear to the audience that there is tension between Donnie and his family, but more specifically between him and his mom, who seems to sort of resent him for his mental disorder. After dinner, his mom comes into his bedroom asking him what happened to her son because she no longer recognizes his personality, to which he blames his pills for his behavior.
In the middle of the night, Donnie suddenly wakes up and walks to a nearby golf course, where he meets Frank, a man in a giant bunny suit. Frank tells him that there are 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds left until the end of the world. We then see Donnie’s sister sneaking back into the house, and seconds later, there is a giant crash. A jet engine had fallen through their roof directly into Donnie’s bedroom, and had Donnie been home that night, he would have died. The Darko family goes to stay in a hotel while their house is being repaired, and while there the parents have a conversation about someone they knew in high school, who people said was doomed. They start to wonder whether Donnie is in a similar situation.
The following day at school, Donnie’s English class is discussing a story in which some children flood a woman’s house and burn a mattress full on money, foreshadowing a flood at the school and a house that gets burned down, both events that are caused by Donnie being influenced by Frank’s commands. There are several moments throughout the movie where Frank shows up, but it seems that Donnie is the only one that can see him; this is why his psychiatrist diagnoses him with schizofrenia. There are different theories about Frank, because later in the movie he is with friends and takes off the head of the bunny suit, so he is in fact a real person, but why Donnie sees an imaginary version in his head is never really explained.
One of the main topics is time travel, because Donnie can see this strange beam coming from people’s bodies, including his own, showing the path that they are about to take. He starts to become obsessed with time travel, wondering how it could help him regarding the world ending. In the end, doomsday comes and he has to decide whether he is going to take action and stop it from happening, which would come with consequence for him.
This movie, while not widely known by the general public, is a loved cult classic; people either love it or hate it. The people that hate it view it as dumb, meaningless, and confusing, while the people that love it could watch it ten times over and make new connections every time. It involves emotion evoking topics including love, fear, mental illness, and the end of the world.
Five words: adolescent, creepy, dark, time-travel, doomsday
Thesis statement: A schizophrenic high schooler is warned about
the end of the world by an imaginary man in a bunny suit. He then
has to figure out how to stop this from happening.
