Donnie Darko – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Who is Donnie Darko? At school, he is a teenage outsider. At home, a boy struggling with mental health issues. In his dreams, he is a chosen one, visited by a large, dark rabbit named Frank — who claims that the world will end very soon. And when dreams begin to intrude upon reality, Donnie is confronted with questions bigger than life itself: about time, destiny, and the nature of the entire universe.

Donnie Darko is like a plunge down the rabbit hole. It is a cinematic puzzle that encompasses time travel, a Lynchian take on American suburbia, high-school drama, a parody of self-help culture, physics, philosophy, turn-of-the-millennium social anxieties, and Alice in Wonderland. It is a riddle much like its director, Richard Kelly, who after his brilliant debut went on to make two equally strange films — and then fell silent. It is also a breakthrough role for Jake Gyllenhaal, who was just 20 at the time of filming and, as Donnie Darko, first demonstrated his talent for portraying ambiguous, complex characters.

Calling Donnie Darko a cult film is no exaggeration: it is, in fact, a textbook example of cult cinema. The title initially flopped in theaters, only to gain a devoted following over time. In the era of the early Internet, fans dissected even the smallest details on online forums, trying to arrive at an answer to the ultimate question: what was it all about?