Making Sense of Joker: Folie à Deux’s Baffling Surprise Ending

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Joker: Folie À Deux.

It's pretty unclear who exactly Joker: Folie à Deux is for. While 2019's Joker earned more than $1 billion at the global box office and remains the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, Folie à Deux doesn't exactly run with the troubled-loner-enacts-violent-revenge-fantasy formula that helped make its predecessor such a success. Instead, filmmaker Todd Phillips offers up a prison/courtroom drama-meets-Lady Gaga musical that undercuts its titular character's purpose.

The second installment in Phillips' dreary reimagining of DC Universe lore opens with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) institutionalized at Arkham State Hospital while awaiting trial for the crimes he committed in the first movie as his clown makeup-sporting alter-ego, Joker. Arthur has all but wasted to away to nothing during his time at the glorified prison, where the guards—led by Brendan Gleeson's jolly sadist Jackie—taunt and physically abuse the inmates. He's become such a shell of his former self he can't even manage to tell jokes anymore. That is, until the day he's led through the minimum security wing of the hospital for a visit with his lawyer (Catherine Keener) and catches sight of fellow patient Lee Quinzel (Gaga), a.k.a. this franchise's version of the notorious Harley Quinn.

"Arthur has become this symbol to people," Phillips told Empire of the character's arc in Folie à Deux. "This unwilling, unwitting symbol now paying for the crimes of the first film, but at the same time finding the only thing he ever wanted, which was love. That’s always what he’s been about, even though he’s been pushed and pulled in all these directions. So we tried to just make the most pure version of that."

However, perhaps more so than the numerous musical numbers, the final minutes of the movie have the potential to alienate even the most devoted Joker fans. While Phillips' films were always intended to be a standalone project that exists in a distinctly different timeline than the DC Extended Universe, Folie à Deux's closing twist shines a whole new light on the origin story of this world's canonical Joker, who—spoiler alert—isn't Arthur. We attempt to make sense of it all, as we imagine many moviegoers will find themselves doing after watching the highly-anticipated sequel in theaters this weekend.

A twisted romance

As Lee—who is eventually revealed to be a Joker fanatic who checked herself into the asylum for the express purpose of meeting her idol—ingratiates herself with Arthur, he stops taking his meds and begins to regain his Joker mojo. By the time the trial gets underway, amateur arsonist Lee has reignited Gotham City's riotous Joker frenzy while Arthur appears to have completely fallen back down the rabbit hole of his own delusional self-righteousness.

But after a night of violence at the asylum shakes Arthur to his core, he takes it upon himself to tell the jury that there is no Joker. There is and has only ever been Arthur. Oh, and he would like everyone to know that he also smothered his abusive mother to death in addition to killing the five other people whose murders the court already knew about.

However, as the jury forewoman begins rattling off guilty verdicts for all the charges levied against Arthur after an extremely short deliberation, he's granted a temporary reprieve by a massive car bomb exploding outside and blowing up half the courthouse—a twist that also lends Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) his signature Two-Face appearance. Arthur flees uptown and finds Lee on the steps leading up to his old apartment. (Despite her propensity for setting fires, she appears to have been uninvolved with the car bomb that sets him free, Arthur's courtroom disavowal of Joker being about the biggest turnoff he could have mustered.) There, she proceeds to reject his overtures of love and tells him in no uncertain terms how little he now means to her.

Joker vs. Joker

Folie à Deux's closing minutes find a detached Arthur back at Arkham, having been convicted of all the crimes for which he was on trial and now facing presumably either a lifelong stay or, as the prosecution said they would seek for his crimes, the death penalty. He's soon called away by a guard, who claims he has a visitor and leads him down an empty hall.

Suddenly, a rather creepy fellow inmate—who the camera has pointedly panned to a few different times throughout the movie—pops up behind Arthur asking if he can tell him a joke. Unfortunately, the punchline of this bit is the inmate repeatedly stabbing Arthur while all the guards remain conspicuously absent.

As Arthur bleeds to death on the floor, his killer leans against the wall laughing before using the shiv to carve his mouth open into the type of mutilated grin known in real life as the Glasgow smile and popularized in association with the Joker by the late Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning role in The Dark Knight. The moment seems to not-so-subtly imply that the killer (Connor Storrie, credited on IMDb only as "Young Inmate"), rather than Arthur, is the maniacal supervillain who goes on to become Batman's archnemesis.

It also squares with what Philips told Empire leading up to Folie à Deux's release about whether Arthur would turn out to be Gotham's Clown Prince of Crime. "We would never do that," he said. "Arthur clearly is not a criminal mastermind. He was never that."

So, for those keeping score, it appears that the Joker sequel ends by confirming that the man who claimed the mantle of Joker over the course of these past two movies has never in fact been the villain we've known and loved/hated since 1940. What, exactly, is Phillips going for here? A final gotcha to leave audiences stunned as they exit the theater? A meditation on the perils of lionizing disturbed individuals with ultra-violent tendencies?

Whatever his reasons, I guess we finally know how the real Joker got those scars.