Singsong Sequel ‘JOKER: FOLIE Á DEUX’ Is Provocative Anti-Entertainment

If you’re like me, when you first heard the title of Todd Phillips’ follow-up to his controversial 2019 smash hit Joker, you probably Googled “folie à deux.” It refers to a kind of shared insanity experienced by those closely connected. Pretentious? Absolutely—doubly so for a Joker sequel—but it promised more than just your standard superhero/villain fare. Especially when we learned the film would be a love story between Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck/Joker and a new take on Harley Quinn, played by none other than Lady Gaga. Then came the kicker: it’s a “jukebox musical.” Doubts redoubled. Much like the first film sparked a million think pieces, fan adoration, cultural backlash, and Oscar plaudits, Joker: Folie à Deux is sure to rile up the masses—but this time for a very different reason. It’s an aggressive form of provocative anti-entertainment.

If Joker drew both praise and derision for feeding into a gun-happy, incel-revenge narrative—the very kind of misguided psychopathy that inspired killers like James Holmes—Folie à Deux will earn a similar reaction for the exact opposite reason. Director Todd Phillips commits anti-fan service, continuing Arthur Fleck’s story after he massacred six people (including a beloved talk show host on live national TV) in ways decidedly unexpected. Arthur is imprisoned, awaiting trial. Our first glimpse of the now incarcerated Joker sees Phoenix’s gawky frame: sharp and emaciated, startlingly undernourished physically. His starved physicality a warning of the skeletal story to come. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher bathes these scenes in a drab, muddy palette that telegraphs one thing: this movie will not be fun. On that front, Phillips and Co deliver.Arkham Asylum has flattened Joker back into Arthur, a fragile shell held together by pharmaceuticals and the grind of prison life, overseen by Brendan Gleeson’s sadistic guard and the rare promise of a cherished cigarette. But when Arthur meets Lee (Gaga) in a musical therapy group (how bad can Super Max prison be when there’s a musical therapy group?), his will to live comes roaring back. She puts a smile on that face. The rub remains that Lee doesn’t love Arthur; she loves Joker. She encourages him to return to his homicidal clown persona, despite what that may mean for his impending trial. Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) seeks to divide the man (Arthur) from the myth (Joker), seeking an insanity plea. Arthur’s desperate need to be seen and loved bumps against his need to face what he’s done. The person and the performance jostle for dominance—are they at odds or one and the same?

Weighing in at a hearty 2-hours-and-19-minutes, Folie á Deux charts an almost admirable course that’s undone by both by its ambition – and its self-hated. Its refusal to conform is both its most interesting and most frustrating aspect. The film’s much-too-frequent musical numbers—charming at first, distracting soon after, and downright agitating by the end—do little to propel the plot forward, instead bloating the runtime past any logical limit. At one point, Arthur asks Gaga’s Lee to please stop singing and it was a sentiment echoed by the entirety of my groaning audience.

By following a villain origin story with an internalized, fantastical reckoning with oneself, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have made a deliberately alienating film—one that interrogates its predecessor’s legacy while almost rejecting it outright. Folie á Deux exists as both an excuse and an apology – the rare sequel that seems to actively wish itself out of existence. Lee’s obsession with a frequently-referenced “TV movie” about Joker—derided by others as hokey and terrible—makes her a stand-in for the obsessive fans who made the Joker movie their entire personality. In many ways, Folie á Deux deliberately seeks to upset those people – a compelling provocation trapped in a bland, unlikely blockbuster.

For Phillips and company to so blatantly wrestle with and reject the legacy of their own film—particularly in its final moments, which already has fans up in arms—is both unexpected and profound. Personally, I found the decisive ending to be one of the film’s most interesting choices and the too-rare example of Phillips having an actual point. But even that boldness can’t save his film from being tedious, dull, and inexcusably misshaped. Narratively, it’s empty. The characters are broad, bland archetypes, and even Lady Gaga can’t do much more than inject a vaguely seductive sociopathy into Ms. Quinzel. Phoenix remains a capable Fleck, but his performance adds little new to this version of the character, offering no fresh dimension or purpose to this already broken figure.

Folie à Deux desperately wants to straddle the line between gritty realism and fantastical surrealism, but the blend is unconvincing and, frankly, off-putting. The grounded elements are constantly undermined by far too frequent, completely unnecessary musical numbers, while the dream-like surrealism awkwardly clashes with the dreary, prison-and-courtroom melodrama. Worse still, the musical part grinds any sense of already too-rare momentum to a halt. It’s a movie that fundamentally doesn’t work because it doesn’t have a point other than serving as a meta-commentary on its own legacy. I get what it’s going for— interrogating its own possibly misguided cultural impact—but it lands with all the self-importance and stiffness of the Seinfeld series finale. But with songs.

For his part, Phillips has silenced his critics in the strangest way possible. His choices here ironically call to mind the image of The Dark Knight‘s Joker gleefully burning an indeterminate mountain of cash. That $200 million reportedly went into this is mind-boggling. Let’s build a mountain indeed. Phoenix and Gaga deliver on the talent front and there are some costly looking elements here and there but there is not a single set piece here that demands an investment nearing that sum. One can’t help but recall Phillips’ pitching the first Joker to Phoenix as a “heist movie”: “We’re gonna take $55 million from Warner Bros. and do whatever the hell we want,” is something Phillips actually said on record. Although that heist paid off the first time, this follow up feels more like a straight-up ransom. For a film about insanity and reckoning with insanity, the very idea that this circus made it to our screens is its own little form of curious insanity. And yet I find myself somewhat fascinated by the fact that a bunch of WB suits signed off on a singalong sequel about why it’s actually bad to be a murder clown and/or his adoring fans. The true Folie à Deux may well be the shared delusion between Todd Phillips and Warner Bros. that this concept could have ever worked.

CONCLUSION: More interesting as a concept than in execution, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is a bizarre, off-putting sequel that seems to reject everything that the first film stood for. The pairing of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga proves less thrilling than expected – though both are solid – and the jukebox musical aspect doesn’t work at all.