Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

I adore this film. Five out of five. Not the best film of the year, but quite possibly the most interesting one — and I went back and saw it a second time specifically to check that I wasn't just high on the IMAX screen and the opening-weekend hype. I wasn't.

Some context on how I watched it. I'd heard everything coming out of the festival debut — shameless cash grab, pretentious, meandering — and I deliberately avoided reading or watching a single review beforehand. I saw the scores, that's all. Before the second viewing I did the opposite and binged other people's reviews, because I wanted to understand the complaints. They make genuinely compelling points. I disagree with all of them.

The performances and the camera

The two best things here are the performances and the cinematography. This has some of the best photography of the year — of the decade, honestly. There are multiple shots that made my jaw drop. See it in IMAX if you can.

Joaquin Phoenix keeps surprising me with what he can do with a face; the amount of emotion he gets across is absurd. Lady Gaga is a genuinely great foil, and the way she influences him and his decisions through the film is genuinely compelling. The score is superb too — if Dune weren't in the race this year it'd be a shoo-in for best score.

Do the musical numbers work?

That was my biggest worry going in — shoehorned, and simply not fun. I'm a sucker for a musical, so even weird and kooky would probably have worked on me. But do they actually work? Yes. They're entirely fantastical, but they're not decoration — they show Arthur's emotional state, his distorted view of the world, his position with the people who made him infamous. The courtroom musical number is one of the best sequences in the film and one of my favourite scenes of the year. Yes, the first film did that without music. This one wanted to do something different, and it landed.

Why the mess is the point

This isn't a sequel so much as a part two — your enjoyment depends entirely on knowing the first film. It's one extended epilogue, dissecting the aftermath of the original and what it did to Arthur and everyone around him. Did we need a sequel? No — the first film had a perfect ending, and this one isn't better than it and isn't trying to be. I'm glad it exists anyway, because there was more of Arthur Fleck's psyche worth digging into, and this gives the character the send-off he deserves. It's about infamy, egotism, infatuation, and what happens when all of that collapses. Tragic, dark, and completely uninterested in what the audience wants, which is exactly why it works.

Is it messy? Absolutely. And it never once let go of my attention.