There's "hard to understand" and then there's Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly's cult classic mindbender about a suburban boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who's visited by Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume and warned that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Frank's visit is followed by a jet engine crashing into Donnie's room, so it's understandable that Donnie starts acting erratically in the weeks that follow—but the ending, which finds him back at the start of the movie's timeline, laughing in his bedroom and waiting for the engine to drop in and kill him, is much more difficult to parse.
Reams have been written about Darko's meaning, but the nugget-sized version is essentially this: Donnie was a sort of locus point for a tear in the space-time continuum, and although he spends much of the film unaware of it, his actions throughout the bulk of the film take place in an alternate universe where he's needed in order to set the universe straight—basically by arranging it so the jet engine ends up in his bedroom. There's a lot more on the subject here, and whether or not you truly understand it all, Donnie Darko remains a singularly trippy experience—but there's definitely a method to Kelly's madness.
From Looper.com
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