Donnie Darko is a teenager living in the suburban town of Middlesex in the US, who is trying to cope with a somnambulism (sleepwalking) problem. He lives with his mother and father Rose and Eddie, and his sisters Elizabeth and Samantha, and his problem is being examined by psychiatrist Dr. Lilian Thurman who is trying to uncover the cause of his nighttime journeys. On October 1st 1988 he wakes to find himself in the middle of the night on a mountain road and the following night his travels bring him to meet a man called Frank, dressed in a bizarre fake-fur black rabbit suit. Frank tells him that the world will be destroyed in exactly 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Eventually getting home Donnie finds that had he been in bed he would have been killed by the jet engine which has become detached from a plane and plunged through his bedroom wall. Donnie's life gets increasingly bizarre after he makes friends with a new girl at school, Gretchen Ross, and he finds that his gym teacher, Kitty Farmer, is trying to introduce the teachings of Jim Cunningham, a controversial self-help guru, into her curriculum. Donnie rebels against this and is suspended. Donnie and Gretchen grow closer, and Donnie's visitations by the bizarrely-suited Frank also increase. Donnie is given a book by authoress Roberta Sparrow which tries to explain his hallucinations, but then Frank appears and tells him to burn down Jim Cunningham's house. Donnie does so and in the wreckage is found a dungeon and evidence of pornographic pictures of children which have been taken there. Jim Cunningham is arrested and put on trial, forcing Donnie's mother and father to take over the running of the school dance team, of which Samantha is a member, and having to fly to Los Angeles where the team is to take part in a competition, when gym teacher Kitty Farmer decides to stand by Jim Cunningham during his trial. Alone in the house Donnie and Gretchen decide to throw a party on October 30th, the day Frank has warned the world is going to come to an end. At the party Donnie has another vision which makes him go to the house of authoress Roberta Sparrow, where he and Gretchen find a robbery in process. One of the robbers is Frank - minus rabbit suit - who in the 'real world' has no idea that he appears in Donnie's visions. The bizarre nature of Donnie's hallucinations are about to come to a surprising, disturbing revelation, where perhaps nothing is to be believed. Director Richard Kelly was only twenty-six when he made Donnie Darko, which makes his feature film debut all the more remarkable. A truly bizarre and multi-layered fantasy, the film genuinely has the audience wondering what level of reality they are in from scene to scene, as Donnie's visions start to become more frequent and more relevent to his own life. The bizarre twists of the final third of the film are some of the most audacious in recent memory, leaving a film which provokes audiences to think as well as react. Co-produced by Flower Films, the production company run by Drew Barrymore, who plays one of Donnie's teachers, this well-cast film also has Jake Gyllenhaal (October Sky) as the troubled Donnie, Katherine Ross (The Legacy) as his psychiatrist, and a cast-against-type Patrick Swyaze as the duplicitous Cunningham. Director Kelly has revealed that early previews of the film made Donnie's role in the plot clearer, taking away some of the ambiguity. That he reedited the film to restore more mystical, challenging qualities is to be applauded.