Spoiler alert! Do NOT read this if you haven’t seen the movie as it will ruin the ending.

Donnie Darko takes place in October 1988 in the town of Middlesex, Virginia during the time of the United States presidential election. Donnie Darko is an intelligent though somewhat emotionally troubled and disturbed teenager who sleepwalks, and is in the medical care of a psychiatrist with whom he discusses his deepest and darkest thoughts.

One night, a mysterious jet engine from an aircraft falls into Donnie’s bedroom and onto Donnie’s bed. Donnie avoids death by obeying a voice in his head causing him to sleepwalk outside from his room, which effectively corrupts space and time. The voice in is his head is that of Frank, an “imaginary friend” dressed in a creepy rabbit costume. At midnight on October 2nd, Frank tells Donnie that the end of the world will occur in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.

Throughout the movie, this rabbit Frank instructs Donnie to perform specific acts that will ensure a certain chain of events to take place. While listening to Frank’s instructions, Donnie does several things. He floods his high school, giving him the opportunity to court a new classmate and potential love, Gretchen Ross. Donnie pursues time travel, leading to a converation with his science teacher who gives him the book The Philosophy of Time Travel. This book was written by Roberta Sparrow, an elderly town resident known as “Grandma Death” among the neighborhood kids.

Eventually, Donnie begins seeing ripples in space-time, depicted as a water-like tentacle flowing out from people’s chests. Theoretically, these ripples are caused by the corruption of the current timeline. The tentacles indicate where a specific person will travel to within 30 seconds. For example, he sees one tentacle snake into the room, which is soon followed by his younger sister skipping through the room. Another tentacle leads Donnie to a pistol in his parents’ closet, which he takes and keeps for reasons that will become apparent later. These singularities and ripples are described in detail in Roberta Sparrow’s book.

Donnie and Gretchen go to the movie theater to watch a double feature - The Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ. After she falls asleep, the rabbit Frank appears and shows Donnie a wormhole portal in the cinema screen. It is at this point Frank takes off the rabbit head and reveals himself as a teenage boy with a bloody, gaping wound in his right eye.

Frank then tells Donnie to burn down the house of a motivational speaker named Cunningham, thereby exposing a dark secret - Cunningham is running an illegal porn empire. The motivational speaker’s arrest begins a chain of events that results in Donnie’s mother chaperoning his younger sister and her dance group on a flight to the talent hunt program Star Search in Los Angeles, as the coach is a passionate supporter of Cunningham and wants to defend him in court. This gets Donnie’s mother out of the house so Donnie and his sister Elizabeth are free to host a party.

On the night of October 29th, Donnie and Elizabeth have a party to celebrate her being accepted to Harvard. Gretchen turns up to the party in a state of panic due to the fact that her mother has disappeared. Gretchen is extremely worried her stepfather (who had stabbed her mother a few years back) has returned to kill her mother. Donnie takes Gretchen upstiars to his room in an attempt to comfort her. While Donnie and Gretchen are upstairs, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, Frank leaves the party.

Donnie and Gretchen and two other friends decide to go get advice from Roberta Sparrow (the old lady who authored the book mentioned above) when they are ambushed by two bullies, who happen to be robbing Sparrow’s house that night. In the struggle, Donnie is brought to the ground and is held down with a knife to his neck. The bully then says: “Why the fuck are you here?”. Donnie simply says, “Deus ex Machina” (”god out of a machine”). The bully is a bit confused and angered by Donnie’s response, and says: “What the fuck did you just say?”. Donnie then simply says: “Our Saviour”.

Meanwhile, Gretchen (having been pushed to the ground by a burglar) is run over and killed by a car swerving to miss Sparrow who has made her way out of the house. The bullies flee. At this point, it is past midnight, so it is October 30th. The car that killed Gretchen stops, and Donnie gets a glimpse of the driver. After seeing that the driver is Elizabeth’s boyfriend Frank in a Halloween rabbit costume, Donnie shoots him in the eye and instantly kills him (earlier foreshadowed when Donnie talked to Frank in the bathroom and he raised a knife, making stabbing motions at Frank’s right eye, as well as during the scene in the movie theater when Frank removes his mask to reveal a wound in his right eye).

Donnie, heartbroke and upset by this chain of events, brings Gretchen’s body home and places it in a car while he figures out what he’s going to do. At this point, he notices a wormhole portal opening directly over his house, so he drives to a hillside overlooking Middlesex to get a better view. During this time, police vehicles come screeching to a halt in front of his home.

From the hilltop he can see in the distance that the portal is the distinct shape of a tornado with an airplane flying directly over it. Within this airplane is Donnie’s mother and sister who are experiencing turbulence on their return flight home. One of the airplane’s jet engines detaches and falls. The engine travels through the time portal to 28 days earlier and crashes into Donnie’s bedroom - causing a time travel predestination paradox. To save the girlfriend he will never meet, and his mother and sister who would’ve died due to the missing engine on their plane, Donnie stays in bed and allows the jet engine to fall on him and kill him - bringing everything full circle.

The movie ends on the morning after the original jet engine accident. Donnie is dead and his body is removed from the house as his family is seen mourning the loss. As all the people upon whom Donnie’s actions had an impact (in the alternate timeline) sit stunned.

Frank, with a prototype bunny Halloween mask, subconsciously touches his right eye with a surprised look on his face. Gretchen is alive and rides by on her bicycle. Never having met Donnie, she talks with a neighborhood child about the sad accident. She waves to Donnie’s mother, and there is a sense of unknown recognition between them.

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