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Despite all this confusion, what’s amazing to me is how much I enjoy the movie anyway. The story is dense and confounding and there’s no narrative reward at the end, unless you are going with the Doctor Who interpretation. There’s no question that upon first viewing, Donnie Darko is captivating yet frustrating, powerful yet somehow pointless. But the tone of the film maintains a perfect symmetry of humor and sadness, keeping you off balance but never making you feel reluctant to watch. The pacing is deliberate but meaningful, so although the film feels a little long, you never feel bored. And as I mentioned before, the success or failure of the whole thing depends on Gyllenhaal, who is in almost every scene. His character is the axis around which everything and everyone in the film revolves and long story short, The future Prince of Persia pretty much owns it. Many actors do not emote well, so the ones who do tend to stand out from their peers.

Gyllenhaal manages Darko’s fear, vulnerability, confusion and anger so well you have to wonder whether of not he was acting at all. Without question the reason this baffling film works so well is because you buy into what Donnie is going through, even if you don’t understand it.

I realize that I sound conflicted about this movie. I really do like it. The problem is that it’s so hard to define or classify that it's hard to say definitively whether it succeeds or fails. It’s not a horror movie, although it maintains a persistent drumbeat of foreboding even during light moments. It’s not a teen comedy, although the funniest parts of the film are Donnie’s disillusionment with conformity and his awkward attempts at young love. And it isn’t exactly a science fiction film, although the official interpretation of the story’s events sounds like something out of a sub par Star Trek episode. But however you choose to look at it, and whichever aspect of it appeals to you (or doesn’t), it’s hard to come away from Donnie Darko completely empty.

The unusual ending might leave you perplexed but you can’t help but feel that somehow everything turned out as it was meant to. Donnie seems to find a purpose, and the people around him discover truth and closure in their own ways. Both the first time I saw this movie ten years ago and the last time I watched it last night, I walked away feeling that in Donnie Darko’s case, the glass is half full. Somewhere out there is a 60-year-old woman, pulling her teacher’s pension check out of the mailbox and smiling. But she’s not smiling at the amount of the check, she’s smiling because many hundreds of miles away, her most troublesome student has finally mastered the dubious art of intellectual reduction. Thanks for the memories, Mrs. Karnes.

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