Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

The sequel to a billion-dollar provocation arrives dressed as a jukebox musical and a legal drama, which is a pairing roughly as stable as the pairing at its center. We are back in Arkham with Arthur Fleck, awaiting trial, humming standards, and falling for a fellow inmate who calls herself Lee. The ensemble includes Lady Gaga, Zazie Beetz, Ken Leung, and Harry Lawtey, and the film casts them with no apparent interest in what their presence signifies. Diversity here is arithmetic, not argument. The picture never pauses to comment on who is on screen.

On the matter of neurodivergence, the film is a study in ambivalence. The entire plot turns on a dissociative identity disorder defense, on Arkham's inmates, on a psychologist delivering a diagnosis from the witness stand. That is a great deal of clinical furniture, and none of it is deployed affirmingly. The tone is bleak, punitive, and content to let madness serve as atmosphere. Lee Quinzel, meanwhile, is a fascinating failure of an idea: manipulative, amoral, and defined from first frame to last by her fixation on a man. A feminist reclamation this is not. The film contains no LGBTQ content of any kind, no environmental concern, no body-positivity messaging, and no racial consciousness whatsoever. Minority characters simply exist, unremarked, which is its own quiet kind of nothing.

Class resentment does flicker through the courtroom, where corrupt officials, media exploitation, and institutional abuse all get their moment. The first film's economic fury is largely absent, replaced by a long interior monologue about a man who would like to stop being a symbol. That gesture earns a modest score and no more. Historical revisionism is not on the menu, this being fiction about a comic-book figure. As for sermonizing, the film has almost none to offer: it is a nihilistic character study with show tunes, content to leave the audience in the rain. It even kills its protagonist and refuses to explain why. A picture that declines to tell us how to feel is, in this ledger, a rare vintage.