Joker: Folie A Deux
Hey everyone and welcome, today we will be talking about the film Joker: Folie a Deux. There will be spoilers so be warned but also you can subscribe and come back later and watch. Fun Fact, Folie a Deux is a delusion or mental illness shared by 2 people in close association. This film came out in 2024 and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, and Brendan Gleeson and was directed by Todd Phillips. So without further ado let’s get right into it.
Joker: Folie a Deux follows Arthur Fleck aka The Joker who is on trial for the murder of 5 people whom his lawyers are arguing is because of mental illness. While in Arkham Asylum he meets Harley who he quickly falls for and who wants him to really embrace his Joker personality.
Joker: Folie a Deux is a musical psychological thriller. It has similar vibes to Joker, American Psycho, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Joker: Folie a Deux is a sequel to Joker which for me was a decent movie but the one thing I keep coming back to is does that movie feel like a Joker movie. As time has passed and I’ve had time to think about it, I feel like these movies would be better off if they didn’t have the Joker name attached to them. The first movie felt like a loose adaption of the killing joke comic but this film kind of lost me. This movie feels like they wanted to tell a story, but instead of backing an original story, they decided to push it out as a Joker film, which for me, doesn’t really work. I am going into this with some knowledge of the character but not an expert. However, it still remains that when adapting a character, I think there are creative liberties you can take but at the end of the day, there are some things that should be taken into account, and for the Joker, the one thing that should be taken into account is the batman and their relationship not only the joker’s relationship with the city.
The Batman and Joker are Diametrically opposed to each other, or the opposite of one another, and this is why he is such an interesting character as a Batman villain. He represents chaos while Batman represents order. Having a Joker movie without Batman is a bold choice and even with Gotham as a background and other side characters, it just doesn’t really work out this time. One thing about DC comics is that they have some iconic heroes and villains with so much to pull from and Joker and Harley both have interesting stories that you could mix in but this film didn’t have much to make the characters really stand out.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck aka Joker and for what he was given I think Jauquin does a great job with acting out this character who clearly is mentally ill. He has a lot of fans after the last film which you may be wondering who would stan a serial killer, well you look at people like Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez who had fans and you will see that it’s not all so shocking. The Joker in this film is just a mentally Ill person and one of the most exciting things about the Joker character in general to me is that he is insane and it’s not something you can justify but also it’s partly because of his interaction with acid that he fell into. A lot of serial killers are mentally ill and if they wanted to go down that route I feel like they could’ve tried harder to make that connection but instead, I feel like they demonize mental illness and make it this general thing and then they try to use that as a justification for his crimes. In the end, he ends up getting stabbed to death which was weird to me because it didn’t seem like the guard was setting him up but the guard left him alone to get killed and it just ended on a very anticlimactic note.
Harley or Lee is played by Lady Gaga and I actually really enjoyed her acting in this movie even though I had issues with her character. This movie is a musical as well and if there’s one thing I know Gaga can do, it’s sing and sing well and she delivered in that aspect. I was worried because Harley Quinn 1. has been done iconically already in live-action by Margot Robbie, and 2. is a character with a cool backstory, and from the trailers, I gathered she wasn’t a doctor which is a big plot point with the Joker and Harleys relationship. In the film, we first meet her in the mental hospital and she immediately gravitates towards Arthur. We later learn that she does have her PHD, lied about everything, and is obsessed with Arthur based on what she heard on tv so they basically turned her into a stan. Her story didn’t really draw me in and make me believe she was a doctor and that said doctor would do all of that to get someone’s attention. As soon as he wants to drop the Joker persona she jumps ship and it alludes that she wants to kill herself but then I can’t tell if she does when she talks to Arthur on the steps but her story just trickles out after that.
Harry Lawtey plays Assistant DA Harvey Dent who I feel is probably most like his comic counterpart and at the early stages of his career. I’ve seen Harry in Industry, which is great and you should check it out by the way, and he has a British accent so it was my shock in this film to hear his American and I thought he did well. He goes after Joker a lot in this film trying to get him the death penalty and they did a great job of showing how good he is in the courtroom. His performance drew me in and had me feeling like I was watching a law procedural. In the end, when the bomb goes off in the courtroom half his face is kind of scared and I wondered if that was hinting at him being two-face in the future.
The movie is a musical and I knew this going in but my god there were too many performances. I feel like the performances were meant to show like mental breaks in the character but I just feel like the transitions weren’t smooth and it also wasn’t clear so I didn’t really see what they were trying to add with these performances. Funny enough I thought the score was great so without the musical performances, the music in the film was lovely.
The movie seems like like a deeper dive into the mental state of Arthur and we spend so much time in Arkham which I think takes away from what the movie could be. What the film is leading to also isn’t much to look forward to like there are two options: he is declared insane or the death penalty and none of those are great options and you may think well maybe he’ll break out of prison but as the film goes on you kind of figure out that breaking out is just not happening for him. Throughout the film, we hear a lot about his supporters and it seems like he would rally them or they would become his henchmen but in the end, nothing really happens with them and it just becomes a fad that disappears. The amount of time we spent with him in Arkham really dragged and by the time we got to the actual trial, I was ready for the movie to wrap up.
I know Gotham resembles a real city and it really looked like SF or NY and you would see the occasional Wayne Tower or Gotham on something else to let you know you were in this DC world. I’ve got so used to seeing the city so grimy that I honestly was shocked it wasn’t. Also having Arkham on an island like Rikers or Alcatraz was an interesting choice because there is a scene where you think the Joker will escape but then I was thinking if he escapes where is he going because they’re pretty much surrounded by water. The city historically has been shown as a town of high violent crime and corruption and in this film, it looked like a normal town. The most Gotham thing to happen in the movie would probably be the bomb going off at the courthouse which actually kind of startled me.
My favorite part of this film was Harry Lawtey as Harvey Dent. I have spoken about his portrayal already but I think how he brought the character to life and also the fact he was in it way more than I thought was a pleasant surprise for me and a positive addition to the cast.
Joker: Folie a Deux unfortunately missed the mark for me. The cast is great and the score is good but the story didn’t draw me in and the musical aspect of it didn’t really work. I do think that a villain-centered movie can be done well but I just think that for this film they should’ve done an original IP instead of an iconic character.
