Greetings, citizens of now.

I've traveled from the present to the past to declare the next month, starting with last week, Time Travel Month, which will in fact go on at least five weeks, unless I unwittingly unleash a critical disaster the future-me will have to come back to avert.

Confused? It's not just the liter of gin in your bloodstream. Time travel is a messy, murky, self-contradictory subject. Just take a look at 2001's Donnie Darko.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a smart but disturbed teenager. When he goes off his meds, he's haunted by visions of a man-sized demonic bunny named Frank, who saves Gyllenhaal from disaster only to warn him the world will end within the next month.

Frank the bunny's not so clear on how exactly everything will end. Before the end of days, he passes time ordering Gyllenhaal to commit vandalism and arson. Even in the less confusing director's cut, the shape of Frank's plan stays frustratingly blurry; Donnie Darko became an immediate cult classic in part because it takes a whole cult just to figure out what the hell's going on.

Time travel. I can authoritatively state that much. And when there's time travel, there's confusion. Normally, this centers around logical paradoxes, like what would happen if you went back in time and stole your dad's Pinto before you could be conceived in it.

Donnie Darko adds to this confusion by constructing a baroque personal mythology of tangent universes and the rules that govern them. Untangling its internal laws is a feat possible only by those who can travel back to a distant time when nobody had anything better to do than argue for nine hours in the parlor about the significance of that hideous dog statue.

But the movie's got more to it than the mystery. Writer/director Richard Kelly fills out his universe with arresting characters, precise details of its 1988 setting, neat camerawork, and strange, funny moments, like when Gyllenhaal lectures his deluded friends on the true nature of Smurf sexuality.

It's got the cast to match those characters, including Patrick Swayze in a dark take on his usual roles, playing a charismatic inspirational speaker whose easy New Age answers hide his horrible perversion. This role singlehandedly made me reappraise him from "that shirtless doofus from the '80s" to "all right, the ladies are right to love him."

Kelly's wide, sharply defined world provides the stable ground needed to make its chronological prancing as creepy but intriguing as Gyllenhaal himself. This world, and the people in it, rewards repeat viewings of Donnie Darko as much as the mystery gluing it together.

* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com