A jet engine falls through a teenager's ceiling, a man in a rabbit suit tells him the world ends in 28 days, and somehow 25 years later people are still arguing about what actually happened in this film. Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko is going back into theatres.

Fathom Entertainment has set October 2 to 4 for a limited anniversary run of the 2001 cult classic, freshly restored in 4K. Each screening comes bundled with a filmmaker introduction from Kelly himself and what the distributor is calling a look back at why the film has stuck around this long.

"This was not a film that exploded overnight, it found its audience slowly, and then never let go," said Shannah Miller, Fathom's VP of Marketing, in comments accompanying the announcement. That's a fair summary of how Darko actually built its following. It bombed on initial release in 2001, then found its real audience on DVD and midnight screenings through the 2000s, turning into one of those movies everyone claims they saw in college.

The plot, for anyone who's spent 25 years dodging it: Jake Gyllenhaal plays Donnie, a troubled kid in late-'80s Virginia who survives a freak accident only to start seeing Frank, a towering, unsettling figure in a rabbit costume who tells him the world has just under a month left. What follows involves time manipulation, a countdown, and a string of increasingly reckless acts that Frank appears to be steering. Gyllenhaal's performance holds the whole thing together, and he's backed by Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daveigh Chase and a genuinely eerie Patrick Swayze.

For Indian audiences, Darko has mostly existed as a DVD-era word-of-mouth watch or a streaming rewatch during a college hostel binge, never a proper theatrical release here. Nothing in Fathom's announcement suggests this anniversary run extends beyond North America, so anyone here hoping to see the rabbit suit on a big screen is likely looking at a wait, or a hunt through streaming platforms once the restored print eventually surfaces there.

What's notable is how deliberately Fathom is leaning on the film's slow-burn history rather than selling it as some instant classic. There's no attempt to reframe Darko as a mainstream crowd-pleaser. The pitch is straightforwardly nostalgic: bring the film back for the people who found it late, on their own terms, and let Kelly explain in person why a low-budget, genre-bending debut about a suburban kid and a killer rabbit still gets debated a quarter century on.

Whether that debate ever gets a definitive answer is beside the point. Darko was never built to be solved, just rewatched. The bigger question now is whether a 4K restoration and a filmmaker Q&A find their way to Indian screens or platforms at all, and so far there's no word on that front.