Donnie Darko is a American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Richard Kelly , and produced by Flower Films. Set in October , the film follows Donnie Darko Jake Gyllenhaal , an emotionally troubled teenager who inadvertently escapes a bizarre accident by sleepwalking. He has visions of Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume who informs him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Development began in late when Kelly had graduated from film school and started writing scripts. He took an early idea of a jet engine falling onto a house with no one knowing its origin and built the story around it. Filming took 28 days in the summer of , mostly in California. Donnie Darko premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, , followed by a limited theatrical release on October Because the film's advertising featured a crashing plane and the September 11 attacks had occurred a month and a half before, it was scarcely advertised.
The film was adapted into a stage production in and a sequel, S. Darko , followed in without Kelly's involvement. In , he announced that work on a new sequel is in progress. On October 2, , troubled teenager Donald "Donnie" Darko sleepwalks outside, led by a mysterious voice. Once outside, he meets a figure named Frank in a monstrous rabbit costume. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in precisely 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Donnie wakes up the next morning on the green of a local golf course and returns home to discover a jet engine has crashed into his bedroom. His older sister Elizabeth tells him the FAA investigators do not know its origin. Over the next several days, Donnie continues to have visions of Frank, and his parents, Eddie and Rose, send him to psychotherapist Dr.
Thurman believes Donnie is detached from reality and that his visions of Frank are " daylight hallucinations ," symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia. Frank asks Donnie if he believes in time travel , and Donnie in turn asks his science teacher, Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff. Monnitoff gives Donnie The Philosophy of Time Travel , a book written by Roberta Sparrow, a former science teacher at the school who is now a seemingly senile old woman living outside of town, known to the local teenagers as Grandma Death.
