Donnie Darko

On October 2, 1988, 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. Donnie wakes up the next morning on 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. 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.
Frank begins to influence Donnie's actions through his sleepwalking episodes, including causing him to flood his high school by breaking a water main, to which Donnie almost gets caught. Donnie later starts dating Gretchen Ross, who has recently moved into town with her mother under a new identity to escape her violent stepfather. Kitty begins teaching "attitude lessons" taken from local motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, but Donnie rebels against these, leading to friction between Kitty and Rose. Kitty arranges for Cunningham to speak at a school assembly, where Donnie insults him. He later finds Cunningham's wallet and address. Gretchen and Donnie go on a movie theater date, where Gretchen falls asleep and Frank reveals himself to be a teenager with his left eye hollow and bleeding. Frank then convinces Donnie to burn down Cunningham's house, which he does while Gretchen is at the theatre. Firefighters discover a hoard of child pornography at the burned remains. Cunningham is arrested, and Kitty, who wishes to testify in his defense, asks Rose to replace her as chaperone for their daughters' dance troupe on its trip to Los Angeles.
With Rose in Los Angeles and Eddie away for business, Donnie and Elizabeth hold a Halloween costume party to celebrate Elizabeth's acceptance to Harvard. At the party, Gretchen arrives distraught as her mother has gone missing, and she and Donnie have sex for the first time. When Donnie realizes that Frank's prophesied end of the world is only hours away, he takes Gretchen and two other friends to see Sparrow. Instead of Sparrow, they find two high school bullies, Seth and Ricky, who are trying to rob Sparrow's home. Donnie, Seth, and Ricky fight in the road in front of her house just as Sparrow returns home. The bullies and Donnie's two friends leave when an oncoming car runs over Gretchen, killing her. The driver turns out to be Elizabeth's boyfriend, Frank Anderson, wearing the same rabbit costume from Donnie's visions. Angered, and realizing what's happening, Donnie shoots Frank in the left eye with his father's gun and walks home carrying Gretchen's body.
Donnie returns home in the morning as a vortex forms over his house. He borrows one of his parents' cars, loads Gretchen's body into it, and drives to a nearby ridge that overlooks the town. There, he watches as the plane carrying Rose and the dance troupe home from Los Angeles gets caught in the vortex's wake, violently ripping off one of its engines and sending it back in time. Events of the previous 28 days unwind. Donnie wakes up in his bedroom, recognizes the date is October 2, and laughs as the jet engine falls into his bedroom, killing him. Around town, those whose lives Donnie would have touched wake up from troubled dreams. Gretchen rides by the Darko home the following day and learns of Donnie's death. Gretchen asks the neighbor, "What was his name?" Gretchen and Rose exchange glances and wave as if they know each other but cannot remember from where.