Joker: Folie á Deux is a comic book movie and a musical made by Todd Phillips, a director deeply embarrassed by both genres. That should tell you all you need to know about why it so dramatically doesn’t work. Phillips made the choice to dot this movie with musical sequences, and yet publicly resists the Musical label in what appears to be a fear that it makes the film seem less serious. And just as in his 2019 Joker , he does everything possible to keep the comic book origins of this material at a distance. In fairness, it’s an approach that worked out for him on the last movie, which despite being particularly bad and derivative was a huge hit, and even won its star Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for one of the worst performances of his career. But Phillips seems to dislike the people who loved the earlier film as much as those who hated it, if his portrait of their in-film analogue is anything to go by. Honestly, it’s difficult to parse why he made this movie, short of the blank cheque
The most fascinating thing about Häxan is that it is old enough now (at over a century) to be looked at with the same lens that it itself uses to examine the Middle Ages. Just as it posits that the apparent witches of centuries ago were simply women with "hysteria" that the people of that time didn't understand or care to diagnose, we now know hysteria itself to be a pseudo-scientific understanding of mental illness derived from juvenile psychology and plain old misogyny more than any accurate medicinal basis. It is still an intriguing and utterly mesmerizing film though, perhaps because of this fact that so squarely places it in history by its own measure of historiography. But it's also spontaneously fun and wild in a way that dispels any misconception that the silent era was drab and boring. This is a movie about witchcraft and demons, that depicts torture and hell, features nudity, sacrilege, and the Devil constantly flicking his tongue perversely, masturbating