Joker: Folie à Deux review — Joaquin Phoenix is superb in a rare blockbuster that takes risks

Managing to be repellent and pitiful at the same time, Joaquin Phoenix's fearless performance as Batman's cackling archenemy in 2019's Joker was no laughing matter — but it bagged him a Best Actor Oscar while director Todd Phillips' controversial and divisive film went on to gross a billion dollars worldwide. Five years on, Phoenix and Phillips go for broke again with a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, that is equally bold and daring — not least in the way that it doubles down on the first film's rejection of Hollywood's usual comic-book playbook.

A world away from Cesar Romero's campy shtick in the 1960s TV series and from Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's charismatic, scene-stealing turns in Batman and The Dark Knight, Phoenix’s Joker turned out to be the protagonist of a very different kind of supervillain origin story. Living in the film's grim, grotty version of Gotham City circa 1981, his Arthur Fleck was a mentally fragile loner with dreams of becoming an adored stand-up comedian. Pushed over the edge by abuse and social neglect, he went on to commit acts of horrifying violence that saw him perversely adopted as the figurehead of an anarchic anti-rich street movement.

Set two years later, Joker: Folie à Deux finds Arthur Fleck locked up in Arkham State Hospital awaiting trial for his crimes — the killing of five people, one of them live on national television. His sympathetic attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) sees him as a victim of lifelong trauma and maintains that this pain has triggered mental fragmentation — it is his split personality, the Joker, not Arthur, who is responsible for his violent acts. Gotham's District Attorney Harvey Dent (Industry's Harry Lawtey), the Batman world's future villain Two-Face, doesn’t buy any of this and is seeking the death penalty. The court will have to decide, is Arthur a martyr or monster?

Joker: Folie à Deux's cheeky opening has already given us a take on this debate. It takes the form of a spoof Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon, created for the film by Sylvain Chomet (maker of 2003's delightful, Oscar-nominated animated feature The Triplets of Belleville), and reprises the first movie's climax — in which Arthur's guest slot on the TV talk show hosted by Robert De Niro’s smarmy comedian Murray Franklin ended very bloodily. In this cartoon version of those events, hapless Joker and his literal shadow tussle for supremacy to the strains of "Me and My Shadow".

The incarcerated Arthur is emaciated and heavily medicated, kept passive and docile by Arkham’s casually sadistic guards, led by Brendan Gleeson’s Jackie, who taunt and mock him with their perennial, faux-friendly inquiry: "Fleck. You got a joke for us today?"

While he has been banged up in Arkham, however, Arthur has become an even bigger celebrity than when we last saw him. A TV movie about his story has won him legions of fans — and one of them happens to be an inmate of a psychiatric ward inside Arkham. She is mendacious pyromaniac Harleen "Lee" Quinzel (aka DC Comics’ long-running Joker sidekick Harley Quinn), rivetingly played by Lady Gaga. And when Arthur encounters her in a musical therapy class the pair fall headlong for each other, their shared madness the titular folie à deux. On the occasions when circumstances throw them together, their romance plays out as a series of colorful, bizarre, fabulously costumed, musical fantasy sequences.

The songs Phillips and his co-writer, Scott Silver, have picked for these numbers — set amid Hildur Guðnadóttir’s insinuating score — are another of the film's left-field choices. A mix of showtunes and easy-listening ballads, each choice dripping with irony, they include "That's Entertainment" from Hollywood musical The Band Wagon, the Rodgers and Hart standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and the Carpenters' "Close to You". A moonlit rooftop dance frames Arthur and Lee as a warped Fred and Ginger in black tie and ballgown, while the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody" is staged as a vicious parody of Sonny and Cher’s 1970s TV variety show.

When we are not immersed in these splashy fantasy sequences, Joker: Folie à Deux is a very dour affair indeed, deliberately so. The scenes in Arkham are determinedly grim, while much of the proceedings in court are pointedly downbeat. Phillips knows what he's doing. He doesn't want viewers seeking escapist thrills from the movie — or trying, as some of the first film's fans did, to hail Phoenix’s Joker as a hero to frustrated incels and to anarchists of varying political stripes. Just as a segment of the population of Gotham City heralded the Joker as an agent of chaos (and continues to cheer him here outside the court as he goes on trial), so did a segment of the Joker's cinema audience find him worthy of applause. This time around, Phillips and Phoenix seem determined to give no opportunity for anyone to celebrate the sad, traumatized character they have created.

That said, Phoenix remains every bit as mesmerizing on screen as he was before. Seemingly even more skeletal than in the first film, for which he famously lost three stone, Phoenix again puts his method-acting chops to superb use. Surprisingly, Lady Gaga proves equally hypnotic — and her role turns out to be no less ambivalent and ambiguous than her co-star's.

Joker: Folie à Deux may alienate more people than it pleases, and even those who like it will probably find it a tough watch. But even if you find the movie overly dispiriting, there's no denying that the skills behind it are superb — from acting and directing to production design, cinematography, costumes and score. And even if you find it muddled or dull, there’s no denying that it provides plenty of food for thought. 

Joker: Folie à Deux is now exclusively in movie theaters.