Richard Kelly’s new version of “Donnie Darko” is one of the few movies that justifies a director’s return to revise it. With his first film, if it was clear that Kelly was making one of the truly memorable film debuts ever, it was also clear that he had a long way to go. The original was obscure in places and tonally uneven. The satiric moments rarely fit in with Donnie’s trials. All too often they seemed a patchwork of ideas and jokes too good to leave on the cutting room floor.

With some skillful editing, the restoration of some crucial dialogue, and a few new scenes, Kelly has rectified these problems. More than merely fixing a few holes, though, Kelly has affirmed his original vision in an artistic statement of uncommon clarity and maturity. Take the opening sequence of Donnie riding his bike home after a night of sleepwalking. In the original, this is soundtracked by Echo And The Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”. In the new version, INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” is used instead. At first this feels like a revision of the appalling, Greedo-shoots-first variety. The film’s mood was deftly established by using The Bunnymen, lending Donnie’s suburban arcadia a dark undertone of imminent tragedy, whereas the INXS song is romantic, brighter sounding, more of a standard pop song. It appeared, at first, that Kelly had bowed to marketing men waving calculators in his face. I wondered if the rest of the movie would be suffused with similar doses of fake sunshine.

Kelly’s decision pays off strikingly later on, however. “The Killing Moon” reappears to replace The Church’s “Under The Milky Way” during the climactic scene at Donnie’s house. If the expansive cosmos of The Church’s spacy track is phased out, McCulloch’s line “Fate/Up against your will” perfectly serves the scene’s subtext, as Donnie’s love for Gretchen is about to be tested by the fate that awaits him.

Secondly, as regards the choice of INXS, there are two key points about Kelly’s use of “Never Tear Us Apart”. The first is its aforementioned conventionality. The song is standard pop cliché, full of frivolous rock romanticism, and therefore reflects the theme that runs through the “Attitudinal Beliefs” scenes. Donnie is troubled by the fact that most of the adults in the film would prefer that all unseemly emotions be swept away from view, on the one hand, while championing a simplistic view of love as an all-curing panacea on the other. Though it is less odious in its delivery, “Never Tear Us Apart” echoes that kind of emotional accounting.

Importantly, it is bookended later by Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, which takes a more troubling, more complicated view of love. The echoing titles creates an inevitable contrast. They are to be viewed as a pair of complementary markers that indicate Donnie’s changing view of the world. Joy Division’s song is more in tune with romance as Donnie would perceive it after the events of the plot unfold. He learns that love does not always conquer all; loving sometimes means separating from the loved one; and that bound up in the emotion of love is a host of other emotions, including fear, which is exactly Donnie’s argument against the “Fear/Love” spectrum. By swapping songs Kelly beautifully enriches one of the movie’s main themes, and demonstrates an exciting command of the found materials with which he populates his world.

Also brought into clearer focus is the book “The Philosophy of Time Travel.”  Kelly added pages from the book to create what amount to chapter markers in the movie. The text fully explains what’s happening in the film without sacrificing any mystery. We find out why Donnie “conjures” fire and water, for instance, and come to understand that Frank is really “The Manipulated Dead”, a kind of Virgil to Donnie’s Pilgrim. Its real importance, however, is that the book came from the mind of Roberta Sparrow, a former nun who turned to a fascinating hybrid of theoretical physics and ritual magic to answer her metaphysical questions. Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) asks, “What does philosophy have to do with time travel?”

Plenty, as it turns out, if by “philosophy” one includes the knowledge of God. Sparrow’s philosophy frames Donnie’s journey from agnosticism—a position explained to him by Dr. Thurman in one of the movie’s added lines—to full belief in God. Time travel is a move through what Donnie calls “God’s channel”. Finding himself back in his bed on October 2 gives Donnie the answer he has sought: God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Though he is doomed, he will not, as he fears, die alone. The assumption is that Sparrow turned away from God in leaving the Church for the machinery of time travel. In fact, she found God in the machine; Donnie duplicates this discovery.

The Christlike nature of Donnie’s story is also brought out by the lovely “Mad World” sequence. In the new cut, a title card, “Dreams”, is followed by more of Sparrow’s text as a preface to the song. (The song itself is one of the biggest clues as to what the movie is really about, with its line “The dreams in which I’m dying/Are the best I’ve ever had”.) The text helps us understand that these “Manipulated Living” have witnessed Donnie’s crucible but have forgetten it upon waking. Yet as the images of the people in Donnie’s life go by, it is clear that they have retained some shadow of Donnie’s sacrifice in their minds.

This accords with the revelation of Christ’s suffering and death. As Christians believe themselves marked by the Original Sin and the Fall, those in Donnie’s life retain some faint glimpse of the fate that awaited them before the redemptive intercession of an omnipotent being. All the characters, good and bad, awaken with this sense of having been redeemed from death somehow, but none of them know how or why.

What surfaces is love. The movie ends as it should—without a message to take home in a well-cornered bundle—but Kelly gives us a taste of what Donnie’s sacrifice means when Gretchen waves to Mrs. Darko. It is an act of empathy by two women who are unknowingly joined by a man who loved them and sacrificed his life to save theirs. The film, in short, depicts human beings as having an innate and potentially uniting sense of the divine (or God, the unnamed “Manipulator”).

This is taking the interpretation to a needlessly concrete level. Both versions of “Donnie Darko” are pure fantasy or dream projection. Like Poe, or perhaps Stephen King, whose “It” makes a cameo, Kelly uses fantasy to illuminate a psychological state—adolescent confusion—rather than diagram a coherent story that satisfies the logic of either science fiction or religion. The name “Gretchen” is a deliberate plant, hinting that everything is a Faustian vision. The time travel mumbo-jumbo, with all its theological colorings, is merely a way of evoking a moment in a troubled teenager’s life when a central schism threatens to destroy him.

As such, the film’s true greatness is in the texture Kelly gives his tale. The narrative tissue is a complex, multi-layered dream, reverberating with details and patterns that repeat again and again under different guises. Kelly uses a dazzling array of elements borrowed from pop music, literature, movies, and the Bible, as well as different modes of expression, including satire, comedy, and tragedy, to create a stylistically complex film to rival the best dream movies ever made. As I wrote in my review of the original, his shrewdest choice was granting Donnie his death. The film accepts that a boy’s fate can be unhappiness and doom, and its embrace of God is not a celebration of light but a breathtakingly rich exploration of the ways in which our lives are defined by the interplay of both light and darkness. First film or twentieth, re-cut or original, “Donnie Darko” is the work of a master filmmaker.