By Todd Phillips, the director and co-writer of the upcoming “Joker: Folie à Deux,” says that audiences are going to have sit with his film’s ending for a while.
The sequel to 2019’s acclaimed smash hit film from Phillips sees Joaquin Phoenix reprise his Arthur Fleck character. This time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as Harley ‘Lee’ Quinn.
Participating in a recent pre-screening question and answer session ahead of the film, Phillips tells Slashfilm that plenty of people he showed the film to need a few minutes to process what they just saw:
“For the people that have seen this movie in general … at the end, they sit and they don’t move for about three to five minutes. Then they text me, the ones that know me, or email me and go, ‘I need a minute to process the movie’. I think it’s going to leave you with a very unsettling … I think it’s unsettling. [It] clarifies a lot of things that you might have had questions about in the first movie … I hope it all gets answered.”
That clarification may relate to Phoenix’s character Arthur and his grip on reality that seems decidedly shaky. The first film already demonstrated that he’s a completely unreliable narrator, as seen in the imagined romance with his neighbor (Zazie Beetz). That makes some of his acts in the film, especially in its last half-hour, all potentially part of another delusion.
Phillips says that the murder of Robert De Niro’s talk show host Murray Franklin and “those kids on the subway” are two events that are ‘definitely real’. He adds the new film will clear some of those lingering questions up:
“He had a lot of fantasies in the first movie. This movie really finds Arthur, answers everything as far as, well, that movie really happened. All that stuff really happened.”
Reviews so far for the film have been mixed, and a few do promise the ending as “shocking” and a fitting finale. The comments come as Gaga has just announced the release of her next album, a companion album titled “Harlequin”.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” debuts in theaters on October 4th.
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