‘Donnie Darko’ is a wonderfully discombobulating film, combining cosmic horror, teenage alienation, suburban malaise and the possibility that time itself has somehow gone wrong. It’s a coming-of-age story in which the central character may also be witnessing the end of the world. Set in October 1988, Richard Kelly’s film follows Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a troubled teenager who narrowly escapes death when a jet engine crashes through the roof of his family home and lands in his bedroom.

Donnie isn’t there at the time. But where has the engine come from? And why does it appear to have arrived before the events that might explain its existence? These questions become increasingly bewildering as the film explores wormholes, alternative timelines and the possibility of travelling through time.

There’s also Frank, a terrifying six-foot rabbit who appears to Donnie and tells him precisely when the world will end. But whose world? Donnie’s? Everybody’s? And, in a film where reality itself seems unstable, is there necessarily any difference?

Donnie has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and the film continually encourages us to wonder whether these extraordinary experiences are supernatural or psychological. Is he discovering the hidden structure of the universe, or are we witnessing the workings of a disturbed mind? The brilliance is that the film never makes either explanation entirely comfortable.

I was reminded of ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, with its portrait of a troubled young man alienated from the supposedly respectable society surrounding him. There’s also something of the suburban nightmare of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, where ordinary American homes and schools conceal forces that the adults seem incapable of recognizing.

What makes ‘Donnie Darko’ particularly effective is the specificity of its setting. This isn’t some vaguely defined American suburb. It’s October 1988, in the weeks leading up to Halloween and the presidential election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. Characters discuss politics, and the period details establish a recognisable world of late-eighties American life.

Paradoxically, the more precisely Kelly establishes this reality, the more unsettling its supernatural disruptions become. And there’s an intriguing political dimension. Donnie’s school is a place where uncomfortable questions are discouraged and complicated problems are reduced to reassuringly simple answers. One teacher insists that human behaviour can be placed along a spectrum between fear and love. Donnie quite reasonably objects. Human experience is surely more complicated than that.

Meanwhile, a teacher’s use of Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors’ provokes accusations of subversion, while a self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze offers simplistic moral certainties that conceal a considerably less wholesome reality. There are echoes here of the institutional hypocrisy explored in more recent films such as ‘Weapons’. And watching it now, it’s difficult not to see something prophetic in the insistence that everything must be reduced to opposing categories.

Fear or love. Republican or Democrat. Good or bad. It’s a way of thinking that seems particularly familiar in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Donnie’s experience resists precisely this kind of simplification. He inhabits a universe in which cause and effect may operate backwards, where death might precede the events that produce it, and where individual choices could have cosmic consequences.

The adults offer certainty. Donnie encounters mystery. And perhaps that’s why the film remains so fascinating. It’s tempting to approach ‘Donnie Darko’ as a puzzle that can eventually be solved by working out the precise mechanics of its time travel. But that risks missing its emotional and philosophical significance.

Beneath the wormholes and apocalyptic visions is a young man struggling to understand whether his existence has meaning and whether his choices matter. The great irony of ‘Donnie Darko’ is that the supposedly disturbed teenager may be the only person who understands how complicated the world really is.