Donnie Darko is a film about abstract things that neither I, nor the people who made the film, could get their head around.

Starring a very young Jake Gyllenhaal as a disturbed lad, it explores themes like time travel and fate and mental illness, and seems to find itself at a dead end in every case. The film begins with Donnie waking up in the middle of a road, and when he gets home he finds that a plane engine came out of nowhere and fell through his bedroom. His parents don't seem that bothered when he shows up in the morning considering they surely must have thought he was dead, but his parents don't seem very deep characters anyway. His mum just looks worried all the time and his dad laughs at inappropriate things. That's literally their only defining traits.

It really goes out of its way to hammer home that Donnie has mental problems during the first 15 minutes of the film to make sure there's some ambiguity, and then we get introduced to Frank; A giant freaky rabbit that tells him to do illegal things and says he's from the future. You can always tell when Frank is around because Donnie puts on his rape face. Anyway, Frank arrives and tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, and Donnie decides to do nothing with that information until like the last 2 hours. Must have slipped his mind.

Some freaky stuff happens when Frank is around, like mirrors reacting to touch like water, and weird trails coming off people predicting where they're about to go, and the film does it's best to make it obscure as to if this is actually happening or if Donnie is hallucinating it.

Quite a lot of the story is based around Donnie's school and the people in there, and they all seem really over-the-top and comical. These contrast quite well against the darker bits where Donnie is with Frank. It's like The Breakfast Club with schizophrenia.

Drew Barrymore's character is supposed to be the wacky, alternative teacher who really understands the kids better than anyone, but she just comes across as pretentious and adds nothing to the story. Most of her classes are discussing things that are far beyond what the pupils would actually be talking about at that age, and it's only really there so that it can drop lots of lines and quotes in that reference what's happening in the film in a not-so-subtle way.

Partick Swayze teaches a class about fear which is just stupid, and is again an example of the film littering itself with metaphors that really don't add anything to the story and just make it seem smug.

Donnie goes to talk to a teacher about time travel, and I found this pointless as it was very expositional and removed most of the mysticism of the story. It's like the film-makers thought they were being too clever for the audience, so they'd best just make what's going on blatant. YOU SEE WHAT WE DID THAR??

There's an old lady who, from the confused look on her face and the crazy stood-on-end hair, I'm going to assume was attacked by a balloon. She's supposed to be significant but she's really not. This film has a tendency to build things up and make them seem significant when they aren't.

Donnie falls for a girl called Grechen, but again she doesn't really do anything in the story except give Donnie a reason to want to go back in time at the end, and her death and the scene where Donnie decides to go back are done far too quickly to have any real impact.

The film uses a lot of time lapse and slow motion, obviously because it's a film that deals with the nature of time, and these look good, though I'm still to figure out the significance of the trampoline that keeps showing up. Time is bouncy? No shoes on the time?

For me, the film seems like it set out to be ambiguous and ended up being confusing. You're supposed to not be able to work out if it's fate and time travel or mental illness, but there are bits that contradict each of those options, so you're left with scenes that don't make sense in either case. For example, if it's about time travel, Donnie should have died at the start because time travel would cause a paradoxical loop, but if it's about mental illness, how did Donnie hallucinate a wound exactly where the bullet would hit Frank when he shoots him? There's no way he's that accurate with a gun. Not with the limited vision rape face offers.

I also didn't like how smug the film was. There are far too many lines that are just there because they sound good and reference what's going on. It's in this effort to try and make everything connect to something else, no matter how strenuous those connections are, that made the film feel very pretentious to me. You're trying to be clever. We get it. Now pull your head out of your worm-hole and figure out what's going on.

If Donnie Darko was a dot-to-dot drawing, you'd have to draw a line from the number 1 dot to the number 2 dot. And the number 5 dot. And the number 12 dot in the previous picture. And the staple in the middle of the book.