Almost a year ago I went to see Donnie Darko at the London Film Festival. I wasn’t expecting a lot before I went in, but I adored it. I eagerly waited for its arrival at the cinema, but it never arrived. It was given a fairly low-key release in the States, and then vanished without a trace. When I wanted to get a copy on DVD, I had to get it sent to me from Japan.
But now it’s coming to London. The reviews are appearing, and they’re pretty sensational. There are tiny stickers dotted all around the underground. Cal even saw a trailer. Time Out’s written about it (but they haven’t put the article online, so unfortunately I’m unable to link to it). People are calling it the best American movie of the year. It’s still going to get a low-key release, and I doubt it’ll do hugely well in the mass market. But I’m practically panting at the opportunity to see it again on the big screen…
From the Sight and Sound review: “Boiling the plot down to a few lines, or even to the 400-word synopsis that appears elsewhere in this issue, risks making the story’s knotty skein of incident sound either trite, ridiculous or incomprehensible. But here we go anyway. The bulk of the movie follows a timeline in which its title character (hungrily played by Jake Gyllenhaal), a disturbed teenager who appears to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, is led by visions of Frank, a man in a fake-fur suit and nightmare rabbit mask, to commit a series of crimes while sleepwalking in his small town in 1988.”
- Official Site: DonnieDarko.com