“In 2001, 27-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly created a pop classic of American suburban paranoia in Donnie Darko. This film made Tears for Fears hip (kind of) and had a tremendous discovery in the young Jake Gyllenhaal, playing Donnie, a high-school kid on medication for the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. When a jet engine falls out of the sky one day on Donnie’s house, an event that would have killed Donnie had he not been sleepwalking around the local golf course, it creates an anxiety spasm that ruptures his already fragile wellbeing and he hallucinates a huge, scarily voiced rabbit that tells him to commit acts of violence.
“Kelly sees his characters freshly and clearly, and never reduces them to formulas. In Jake Gyllenhaal, he finds an actor able to suggest an intriguing kind of disturbance; the character is more curious than frightened, more quixotic than eccentric, and he sets a nice tone for the movie.” - The Guardian