Directed by: Todd Phillips
Written by: Todd Phillips and Scott Silver
Joker: Folie à Deux follows up the critically acclaimed Joker (2019), a film that took the world by storm with its gritty, psychological descent into madness, and received a Writing Movie Right from me. Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Arthur Fleck was nothing short of extraordinary. His performance captured a broken man spiraling into his own chaotic version of Gotham’s notorious villain. Director Todd Phillips, along with co-writer Scott Silver, crafted a fresh, raw origin story that both honored the legacy of the Joker while steering the narrative into a profoundly personal and unsettling direction. Now, the sequel Folie à Deux returns, this time exploring Arthur’s fractured psyche alongside Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn, promising another haunting dive into the mind of Gotham’s most infamous clown.
Here come the spoilers…
In this second installment, the film begins with Arthur Fleck confined to Arkham State Hospital, needing to embrace his Joker persona fully. The plot weaves between his internal world, the events surrounding him, and introduces Harley Quinn as his love interest. Harley, a patient at the hospital, falls for the Joker’s chaotic charm, and soon, the two form a dangerous and delusional bond. The film, as its title suggests, is a true folie à deux—meaning “madness shared by two”—with both characters feeding into each other’s insanity. Together, they dream of an escape from their cold, clinical prison and dream up a fantasy of freedom, mixing musical elements with their shared delusions. The musical sequences add a surreal layer to the already fractured narrative, distinguishing the sequel’s tone from the first film while still keeping us anchored in Arthur’s world of disillusionment.
Now, most people will absolutely loathe and hate the musical sequences. We all get what the director was trying to achieve with disillusionment, but it doesn’t serve the story. Arthur has no character growth beyond his struggle with embracing the Joker persona as more than an act. He never gets revenge on the prison guards who brutally beat him. Seeing him let the Joker persona deal with the guards would have been the direction to take the story. Joker is confident, cunning, and a force to be reckoned with. Instead, the writers dwelled too much on Lada Gag and her singing. Both Gaga and Phoenix deliver solid performances, but the material for the story is weak as hell.
Yet this is where I would have written it differently and taken a poor story that garners a mere 5.4 out of 10 and elevated it to a solid eight by simply having the relationship with Harley be entirely manufactured in Fleck’s mind. The scene where he walks up to Harley on the steps is where the disillusion breaks to reality, and it is revealed that Harley is actually a psychiatrist at Arkham, not a patient like he believed. Arthur realizes he imagined the entire relationship in his mind, similar to the incident from the first film, and the rest of the story continues as is. This plot twist would have served the story and theme of disillusionment far better than what these two writers delivered.
There are moments where the story continues to explore mental illness and the idea of identity and reality, yet not enough. It quickly becomes more theatrical than psychological, and while bold as an artistic choice, it loses the grounded nature of the original. The sequel’s musical elements, while bold, risk feeling disconnected from the gripping tension that made Joker so compelling.
Thanks for reading Writing Movie ‘WRONGS.’