Joker: Folie à Deux ending explained – full spoilers for sequel

Given all that, a sequel became something of a certainty, and it has now arrived in cinemas, albeit with rather less fanfare than greeted the original. This time around it’s a musical of sorts, with Lady Gaga joining the cast as a version of iconic DC  villain Harley Quinn, who mainly goes by the name Lee in this film.

Responses this time have skewed more negative – although our own review did award it 4 stars – and it’s tracking to be not nearly as successful at the box office as that first film, while Oscar chances seem like a pipe dream.

Still, the film is nonetheless a major release, and one aspect that seems sure to get people talking is the rather shocking ending, which comes after the incarcerated Arthur Fleck has been put on trial for the series of murders he committed during the events of the original.

Wondering how it all ends? Read on to have the Joker: Folie à Deux ending explained.

Joker: Folie à Deux ending explained – full spoilers

For much of its runtime, Joker: Folie à Deux is an altogether more subdued proposition than the original film – with imagined musical numbers replacing the brooding violence of the earlier effort.

But things come to a head during the final day of Arthur’s trial. When he stands up to make his final statement, he renounces his Joker persona – which does not go down well with Lee, who storms out – and more or less appears ready to accept a guilty verdict.

Unsurprisingly, a guilty verdict is exactly what is returned – but it’s at this point that things take a more dramatic turn. As the verdict is being read out by the jury foreperson, Arthur begins to adopt his maniacal cackle once again, and in a matter of moments, a car bomb suddenly detonates outside the court, causing significant damage.

A couple of things happen as a result of this. One of them – which will come as no surprise to DC fans – is that Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent has one side of his face significantly damaged, a nod to the comic books in which he becomes Two Face.

But more relevant to the story at hand, Arthur also uses the explosion to make an escape and flees from the scene. He’s soon aided by two of his loyal fans and admirers, but he doesn’t appear to pay them much heed and sets off on his own to find Lee on the same staircase that became iconic thanks to his infamous dance in the original film.

But this is not the romantic reunion that Arthur had been hoping for. Instead, Lee rejects him, telling him that she is no longer interested after he backed down in the trial and revealed that the Joker persona was not really part of who he is. She tells him this was a betrayal, and leaves him dejected on the stairs.

Shortly afterwards he is arrested again and sent back to Arkham, now completely without hope. But there is one more twist in store that takes things from bad to worse for Arthur…

Does Joker die in Joker: Folie à Deux?

Back at Arkham, Arthur is told by a guard that there is a visitor there to greet him and follows him into a long corridor. There, another prisoner – credited as Young Inmate and played by Connor Storrie – approaches him and says he wants to tell a joke.

He begins to do just that, but when he gets to the punchline he takes out a knife and brutally stabs him repeatedly in the gut, leaving him to bleed to death. So yes, Joker dies. Or at least, Arthur Fleck and his version of the Joker dies.

At the very end of the film, with Arthur bleeding out, we can see the young inmate in the background carving a smile into his face with his knife (in the style of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight) as he begins to cackle. So one Joker had been killed – but it looks like another has just been born. And so the cycle of violence continues…

Joker: Folie à Deux is now showing in cinemas. 

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