In Donnie Darko, the main character of the same name is a young man troubled by hallucinations of doomsday who ends up being killed by a mysterious falling jet engine.
His sister Samantha Darko is beset by sleepwalking, hallucinations and apparent time travel as she tries to unravel a small town's mysteries.
Seven years after the bizarre death of Donnie Darko, a young man who was crushed to death by a jet engine that fell from the sky, his now 18-year-old sister Samantha Darko runs away from her family in Middlesex, Virginia and joins her best friend Corey on a road trip to California.
During a strange episode, a vision of an undead Samantha with a piece of metal lodged in her skull takes Justin to the local church and commands him to burn it.
After a strange boy commands Corey to come with him to save Samantha, she follows him to a cave into a portal that takes her back in time.
Justin puts on his mask and goes back in time to the moment he was sitting on the windmill that was destroyed by the meteorite at the beginning of the film.
Samantha, never having experienced the events after the meteorite crash, decides to go back home while Corey stays in the small town with Randy.
"[2] Chris Fisher, director of S. Darko, noted that he was an admirer of Kelly's film, and that he hoped "to create a similar world of blurred fantasy and reality.
[citation needed] To promote the film, a viral marketing campaign was launched consisting of three YouTube videos.
The second video is from a conspiracy theorist expressing his beliefs that metallic objects which—with no apparent rational explanation—fall from the sky and lethally crush people are "Artifacts".
Examples of such "Artifacts" are the jet engine that killed Donnie Darko, a manhole that decapitated a young girl, the aforementioned dumpster, and a meteor shower over Utah that resulted in the death of a local man.
She accuses him of being a fraud and a hack who doesn't understand what he's talking about because he stole his theories from Roberta Sparrow's book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, which was featured in the original movie.
She then shows him another link between several of these disastrous events: the falling dumpster left a hole in the ground with a shape apparently similar to a drawing of Frank's mask retrieved from Donnie Darko's psych file; and the same shape also appears in a hunk of twisted, wrought-iron metal pulled from the wreckage of the windmill that was destroyed by the meteor shower in Conejo Springs.
The film was largely panned by critics, often citing its muddled storyline, one-sided characters, and superficial dialogue.
Club gave the film an F, noting that the sequel took "a few simple, surface elements from Donnie Darko and fail[ed] spectacularly in trying to create a franchise".
[7] The Washington Post gave a somewhat better review, calling it average but stating that "The Darko faithful are better off skipping the movie entirely and devoting their attention to the making-of featurette and the commentary track" and that they "have little faith that the moviegoers who once fell in love with Kelly's unique take on teen alienation will see S. Darko as anything more than a very minor pop-cultural footnote.