If movie fans have never seen the film Donnie Darko, they are missing out on one of the most mind-bending thrillers ever made. The creator, Richard Kelly, has decided to never explain the true meaning of the film, which has led to wild speculations about its true message.
One of the biggest twists in the movie is when the character Frank the Rabbit (who is the time-traveling demonic-looking rabbit that sort of haunts Donnie throughout the film) is shown to be a normal guy who accidentally kills the character Gretchen at the end of the film with his car. Donnie shoots and kills Frank, so why and how does Donnie see visions of a dead Frank during the film before he’s even met him and before Frank even dies?
The science-fiction movie Donnie Darko is about a troubled, teenaged boy played by Jake Gyllenhaal who has a history of sleepwalking. One night, a mysterious and frightening voice calls out to Donnie, and he leaves his room and goes outside. This is when the audience is introduced to the six-foot-tall, monstrous bunny named Frank the Rabbit who tells Donnie the precise moment the world will end, down to the last second. Donnie then wakes up at a golf course, returns home, and discovers a jet engine from a plane has crashed into his bedroom—which would have killed him had Frank not called him out of his room.
For this theory, Frank the Rabbit can be seen as the White Rabbit from the children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Frank is here to lead Donnie down the Rabbit Hole and show him what the future would look like if he survived the crash. He is also here to help close the alternate timeline. After meeting Frank, Donnie has been given the ability to see the immediate future, which later begs the question: do the characters and Donnie have free will or not? When Frank the Rabbit stopped Donnie from being killed, this created another timeline in which the act of saving Donnie caused a snowball effect that would result in the end of the world and the deaths of several of the characters. At least, that is how it is portrayed in the film until the end when the viewers realize this “end of the world” Frank spoke of was actually just the end of Donnie’s world.
Donnie Darko is a movie about time travel and alternate realities, and it also can be looked at as an explanation for the feeling of déjà vu. The movie suggests the characters are only living in a simulated reality of life, and there are other timelines in which they would be living different lives. This is shown when Donnie and his new love Gretchen go to an arcade and play a video game simulator which predicts how Gretchen will die in a car crash, suggesting they are just in a simulation of reality. When Gretchen gets hit by a car near the end of the countdown Frank gave to Donnie and dies, the driver steps out—revealed to be Frank (Donnie's older sister's boyfriend) wearing a bunny costume. Donnie shoots Frank in the eye and carries Gretchen home.
A time loop vortex of sorts appears over Donnie’s house and causes a plane in the sky to get one of its engines ripped off. Then, time resets, the alternate timeline closes, and Donnie is brought back to October 2—the day the engine crashed into his room, only this time he laughs as it crushes him to death. It is unclear if Donnie thought this was a bad dream he was waking up from, or if he understood that he needed to die in order to save Gretchen and Frank and any other character he impacted negatively in the future. The film could also be looked at as “do our dreams mean anything” or “do dreams predict the future,” as after Donnie dies, the characters (whom he has not met in this timeline) wake up from some apparently bad dreams.
So, who is Frank the Rabbit, and what part did he play in all of this? Frank is one of the Manipulated Dead as explained in the fictional book The Philosophy of Time Travel written by the old woman known as Grandma Death, who tells Donnie everyone dies alone. Time is normally stable in the Primary Universe, but sometimes the fourth dimension breaks, causing a Tangent Universe, which is the timeline the film is set in. Frank is dead, sent back from the future of the Tangent Universe.
Frank’s dead body is being manipulated through outside forces to guide Donnie into correcting the Primary Universe. What has happened is the jet engine from the plane got ripped out of the Primary Universe and stuck in the Tangent Universe—which in the fictional book is described as only being able to sustain itself for a few weeks before collapsing and potentially causing a black hole that could destroy the Primary Universe as well. Frank’s mission is to guide Donnie into bringing the jet engine (or The Artifact) back into the Primary Universe so this doesn’t happen.
Frank actually ends up corrupting Donnie into acting out in negative ways. But he succeeds in his mission as Donnie was in the right place and time to be able to witness the collapsing vortex so he could be brought back to the Primary Universe along with the jet engine. In this universe, Frank is still alive but touches his eye where the gunshot wound of the alternate universe still haunts him. Donnie Darko didn’t need to die at the end of the film, because the Primary Universe was already fixed, but he dies anyway because he has developed empathy for people, especially Gretchen. Many believe Grandma Death was once in a similar situation as Donnie, but she was able to escape her death once she fixed her timeline and went on to write the fictional book seen in the film.
In Donnie Darko, Frank the Rabbit isn’t the only rabbit. There is symbolism throughout the film of a rabbit, as shown by the shirt a little girl wears with a rabbit on it, or the stuffed rabbit sometimes seen in the background of a scene. There’s also a real-life book Donnie’s class reads called Watership Down, which is a story about a group of rabbits in danger, and one of the rabbits can predict the future. The rabbits in the film can symbolize how Donnie is the savior of humanity, where those around him are the rabbits—or the uninformed and unenlightened, which Donnie must save.