Joker (2019)

There are certain films that arrive trailing so much noise and expectation that separating the work from its own mythology becomes genuinely difficult. Joker, released in October 2019 by Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and Joint Effort, is one of those films. Based loosely on the DC Comics character, it strips away the capes and the cosmos and plants its story firmly in a recognisable, decaying American city. The setting is Gotham, technically, but the visual language is unmistakably that of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all peeling paintwork and rubbish-strewn streets, a city that feels like it has given up on its own people. The premise is straightforward enough: a struggling, mentally ill man named Arthur Fleck, invisible to the world and failed by every system that should have caught him, slides towards violence and, in doing so, becomes something larger than himself. At 122 minutes, the film gives itself room to breathe and to linger, which is either its greatest strength or a mild indulgence depending on how you respond to its particular kind of intensity.

The film represents a striking turn in the career of director Todd Phillips, whose previous work ran to broad, laddish comedies, including Old School and Road Trip. Whatever you make of Joker as a finished piece, the ambition of the pivot is hard to argue with. Phillips drew heavily on the psychological crime dramas of Martin Scorsese, particularly Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and the influence is worn openly rather than disguised. The production itself is a polished but deliberately oppressive piece of work, with Lawrence Sher's cinematography and Hildur Guðnadóttir's score functioning almost as additional characters in the story. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival before its wide release, which helped confirm that the film was being taken seriously as a piece of cinema rather than simply as a comic-book property.

At the centre of everything is Joaquin Phoenix, an actor with a long and varied career that stretches from period epics to intimate dramas. Those familiar with his work in Gladiator or his performance in Walk the Line will know he is never less than committed, but this role demanded something beyond commitment, something closer to total physical and psychological submission. He reportedly lost a significant amount of weight for the part, and the result is a performance built from the body outward. Alongside him, Robert De Niro appears as Murray Franklin, a talk-show host whose presence in the story adds another layer of irony given De Niro's own associations with Scorsese's earlier explorations of broken men in crumbling cities. Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen round out the principal cast in roles that, while secondary to Phoenix's central turn, each serve the film's wider portrait of a society organised around indifference. For fans of crime cinema more broadly, it sits in a tradition that this site has touched on before, including A Bittersweet Life, of films that take violence seriously as a subject rather than using it as wallpaper.

Todd Phillips’ Joker is a bold departure from the superhero genre, less comic-book film, more character study wrapped in gritty 1970s New York grime. Joaquin Phoenix delivers a career-best performance as Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill, socially invisible man teetering on the edge of collapse. His physical transformation (the jerky movements, the haunting laugh born of trauma) is mesmerising, unsettling, and impossible to look away from. The film latches onto his descent with unflinching focus, painting a portrait of alienation, neglect, and the terrifying ease with which society can create its own monsters. The atmosphere is superb: dimly lit apartments, decaying subway tunnels, talk-show stages that feel like pulpits of false hope. The cinematography, score, and production design all work in harmony to create a world that’s oppressive and real. It’s a film that wants you to feel discomfort, and it succeeds. There’s also something undeniably powerful in how it channels real-world anxieties about inequality, mental health, and urban decay, even if it occasionally risks romanticising violence in the process. That said, it’s not The Dark Knight . How could it be? Heath Ledger’s Joker was chaos incarnate, a force of nature shaped in direct opposition to Batman’s order. This Joker exists in a world without Batman (no foil, no mythic counterbalance) which makes it feel strangely unmoored from the legacy of the character. It’s a standalone psychological drama that borrows the iconography, but without the larger mythology, it lacks the depth and tension of a true comic-book tragedy. It’s a strong, well-acted, technically accomplished film, but not a flawless one. And while Phoenix’s performance is unforgettable, the film around it sometimes feels more like a mood piece than a fully realised story. It’s good, very good, but not in the same league as the gold standard.

I keep coming back to the question of what this film actually is, and I think that tension sits at the heart of my response to it. It wants to be a serious character study and, for long stretches, it earns that ambition entirely on the strength of what Phoenix brings. But when the credits roll, I find myself weighing an extraordinary central performance against a film that occasionally seems unsure whether it is building to something or simply arriving at a foregone conclusion. That is not a dismissal. There is real craft here, and real nerve in the filmmaking. It just does not quite add up to the sum of its parts. Worth watching, worth discussing, very much worth Phoenix's time and yours. But perhaps best approached as a portrait rather than a story, and portraits, however striking, are not always the same thing as great films.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-08-05

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Joker (2019) on YouTube

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Todd Phillips: Old School (2003) · Road Trip (2000)
More with Joaquin Phoenix: Gladiator (2000) · Walk the Line (2005) · Signs (2002)
More from Canada: History of the World in Three Minutes Flat (1980) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) · Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) · Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)