Joker: Folie à Deux (Philips, 2024)

Written by Giorgia Cattaneo

Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix comes back a second time wearing the shoes of his most loved and acclaimed character, Arthur Fleck, alias Joker. This time he’s joined by a once-in-a-lifetime partner, the so-called Queen of Pop Lady Gaga, alias Harleen “Lee” Quinn, who already has successfully played two leading roles in movies during the past years - A Star is Born (Cooper, 2018) and House of Gucci (Scott, 2021). Joker: Folie à Deux (Philips, 2024) premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival and is out in theaters worldwide on Friday, October 4th. 

Arthur (Phoenix) was once a professional clown and aspiring stand-up comedian who supposedly suffers from a serious neurological disorder. In Folie à Deux, audiences meet him again while being held in custody at a psychiatric hospital, waiting to be tried for a series of murders he committed two years before. Here, while attending a music therapy session, he becomes acquainted with Harleen (Gaga) and immediately falls under her charm. In these moments, she reveals that she has heard a lot of him in those years and has been dreaming of meeting him ever since, in order to prove to him how much they have in common. The film can be defined as a musical psychological thriller, and it simultaneously follows Arthur’s trial and the obsessive romantic relationship with his counterpart – here comes the meaning of the chosen subhead Folie à Deux, which stands for “shared madness”. 

Todd Phillips undoubtedly has a high level of direction (it also features a Joker’s comic run at the beginning) and the actors’ performances are great. That being said, however, the film is very far away from matching the expectations of a proper Joker (Philips, 2019) sequel. With a runtime of over two hours, time only feels pretentious when nothing new is really being added to the character’s story. The so-seem attempt to get more into a psychic dimension fails as we see the same Arthur from the beginning to the end of the film. Everything that happens in between is just a bland love story with unclear intentions, mixed up with an unnecessary music element (to be fair, such mistreatment of Lady Gaga’s voice and acting presence should be the one on trial). A “new” character – Harleen – is introduced, but everything we know about her is always somehow revolving around Arthur’s character, whom she seems to live for: a missed occasion to explore the world of a disturbed woman and build a new, strong and complex feminine personality for the fans’ beloved “Harley Quinn”. 

At the end, everything turns out to be one thing: boring. To me, this movie is a clear reminder that a safe box office success is not synonymous with cinematic success. Maybe it’s time to focus on more new and unique stories, rather than sequels that, most of the time, are just not meant to be. 

Photo credits to Entertainment Weekly, Variety, and Bloody Disgusting.