Smoke Signals

The Academy Award–winning 2019 thriller Joker was, until only a few months ago, the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. Its 2024 sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, made less in its opening weekend than the miserable dumpster fire that was Morbius. What happened?

It’s complicated. While it took critics and audiences alike very little time to conclude that Folie à Deux was a poor follow-up to its predecessor, and a nigh-unwatchable film on its own at that, the movie isn’t actually all that terrible.

Make no mistake, Folie à Deux isn’t great, it is a stretch to even call it good, but it also isn’t as bad as people have made it out to be.

Joker: Folie à Deux picks up very shortly after the events of the first movie, and wastes no time establishing the factor that was most polarizing to many people in the film’s abstract: it is a musical. The 2019 Joker was a gritty, creeping psychological thriller, where main character Arthur Fleck is a tragic mentally-ill street clown driven to murderous insanity in a composed two hours.

2024’s Folie à Deux is a strangely upbeat romantic musical that deals lightly with Arthur’s mental state over a disjointed and sloppy two hours.

On the subject of it being a musical, there is one criticism that comes to mind about Folie à Deux that stands above all the rest. Despite revolving around elaborate song and dance sequences, this movie’s use of music is ultimately less effective than that of the original. Joker won the Oscar for Best Original Score with its tonal, introspective violins and background music that deepens the immersion of the audience in its tragic tale. The musical numbers in Folie à Deux quickly become overdone and same-ish, never standing out individually nor adding great depth to the film itself. The “Bathroom Dance” sequence from Joker 2019 is more moving than all the songs in Folie à Deux together. The songs are fun and interesting to watch, but they don’t ever hit home like the score of the original did.

Where the original was composed and dutiful, set out to re-imagine the origin story of comics’ most renowned villain, this movie feels like it doesn’t really know why it was made. The plot, far too insubstantial for the indulgent run time, has Arthur Fleck being tried for his crimes from the end of Joker while falling in love with Harley Quinn and reckoning with the identity of “The Joker” that he created. The good of the film is that between entertaining musical numbers, visually-pleasing cinematography, and fantastic performances by leads Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, it ends up being pretty enjoyable to watch and maintains the attention of the audience despite some lulls. The use of musical numbers to engage with Arthur Fleck’s delusions is creative, and the swing aesthetic as a backdrop was a delight, especially when juxtaposed with the violence and grit that remains in the story. 

The bad is that the wild genre change from the original film was ultimately a failure, and the dreadful tone that defined Joker was lost save for a few standalone scenes which felt wholly disconnected from the rest of the film. While Folie à Deux was a fun theatrical experience, by the end the viewer is not given any reward for having watched. The plot never seems to really find its footing nor reach a satisfactory conclusion, and the question that lingers as the end credits roll is “what was the point of all that?” It follows the story of 2019 Joker, but it doesn’t add anything to that story. The first Joker was such an interesting idea, executed with satisfying precision. While being self-contained and disciplined, it also connects to and grounds the viewer in the world of Gotham in a way that no other DC media has. This movie, on the other hand, rides the worldbuilding of the first and attempts an experimental step in no particular direction, and seems not to know that it ends up going nowhere.

Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t a bad movie. It isn’t a good movie, either, but it may well be worth watching just once. If nothing else, it can hold audiences over until we get the sequel to The Batman or other, more exciting DC projects on the horizon. All in all, though, if you want to watch a thrilling clown movie this Halloween, you are probably better off watching the new Terrifier.