By Jackie Shannon
To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Donnie Darko – the cult classic that launched Jake Gyllenhaal’s career and had audiences scratching their heads and debating all of its underlying messages – will be returning to cinema screens in Australia on June 9. If you’re a fan, here’s your chance to see Donnie Darko as it was intended, and if you’ve never seen it before…well, get ready for something truly original. “I came out of film school and I was broke, so I started writing,” Richard Kelly has said of the film. “I set out to write something ambitious, personal, and nostalgic about the late eighties. I thought about a jet engine falling onto a house, and no one knowing where it came from – it seemed to represent a death knell for the Reagan era – and I built the story around that.” The result was Donnie Darko, a trippy coming of age drama looped with time travel and madness…and the rest is history.
