Joker: Folie à Deux review: ‘an audacious musical riff on the Batman villain’s origins story'

It’s an intriguing move to make a sequel to a billion-dollar-grossing hit that doesn’t just challenge the audience, but interrogates its more fervent fandom. That, however, is what co-writer/director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix have done with Joker: Folie à Deux, an audacious musical riff on their psychologically grounded reworking of the titular Batman villain’s origins story.

If the first film took inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy to explore the troubled mindset of Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), the mentally ill aspiring stand-up Phillips conceived as the Joker’s beaten-down alter ego, the new one uses Scorsese’s New York, New York as a creative touchstone for blending the heightened sensibility of an old-school MGM musical with the grit of a down-and-dirty character study.

Taking the story down a musical path is certainly an inspired choice. Arthur’s a fantasist with a dangerously loose grip on reality and what’s a musical but a form of storytelling in which the characters frequently break with reality to express their inner lives in song and dance? When Arthur — back in Arkham Asylum for killing six people in the first film — breaks into a big-band-inspired rendition of Stevie Wonder’s For Once in My Life, it’s an oddly appropriate way to express his complicated feelings about both the notoriety he’s garnered as he awaits trial for murder and the romantic connection he’s just made with a fellow inmate named Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel (Lady Gaga — sensational), a delusional pyromaniac who’s also a self-confessed super-fan of Arthur’s Joker persona.

Whether or not Arthur’s got some form of dissociative identity disorder is at the heart of his defence. But rather than keep Joker at bay, Lee wants Arthur to stop suppressing him. The ensuing film operates according to these divergent personas: we get the ironic razzle dazzle of Arthur and Lee’s Fred-and-Ginger-meets-Natural-Born-Killers love story (which comes replete with duets drawn from vintage musicals like the Faust-themed Vincent Minelli classic The Band Wagon) juxtaposed with a more realistic exploration of the way everyone is trying to exploit Arthur, not least a disgruntled public intent on making Joker their anarchist saviour, ready and willing to burn Gotham City to the ground.

Here Phillips uses Arthur’s trial to slyly deconstruct the hysteria the first film generated, dangling the carrot of another violent explosion, but never delivering it in quite the way we expect. As Arthur literally and figuratively tries to run from his fate, there’s no real catharsis, just a downbeat ending that may resonate in uncomfortable ways with those fans who want a Joker movie to kick off in more conventional fashion.

That Joker: Folie à Deux should subvert expectations, though, is the only predictable thing about it and Phillips sets his ambitious stall out early with a cartoon recap of the first film’s finale that helps tease out the themes explored here (it’s animated by The Illusionist director Sylvain Chomet). Then, at the centre of it all, of course, is Phoenix, once again bony and bonkers and pushing the character as far as he can. His performance this time may not have the shock value of the first film, but it’s a deeper, more delicate dive into Joker’s confused mind — a welcome bit of continuity in a film that’s doing everything it can to avoid being just another sequel.

Joker: Folie à Deux is in cinemas from 4 October