Is Joker: Folie à Deux OK for Tweens? What Parents Need to Know About the R-Rated Sequel

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s new movie is rated R for a reason. 

Joker: Folie à Deux, writer-director Todd Phillips’ DC Comics-inspired sequel to the 2019 hit origin story of Arthur Fleck a.k.a. Joker, treads new territory — it’s a musical, for one — but retains the dark and disturbing subject matter of the first.

Does the movie make for appropriate viewing for kids, tweens or teens? Read on for what parents should expect before letting their children see Folie à Deux. (Note: There are some spoilers ahead.)

Joker: Folie à Deux is almost as violent as Joker

Folie à Deux, per the MPAA, is rated R “for some strong violence.” Phoenix, 49, returns as the titular Batman villain whose psyche is disturbed enough to cause all manner of physical and psychological harm. As fellow Arkham State Hospital patient Harleen "Lee" Quinzel a.k.a. Harley Quinn, Gaga, 38, is similarly volatile. 

However, it’s worth noting that Phillips’ sequel is overall less brutal than 2019’s Joker, which by comparison included “strong bloody violence” in its R rating. Whereas the first movie featured in particular explicit gun violence, Folie à Deux includes mostly harm via stabbing or blunt force trauma. 

In the new movie Gaga’s character does pull and fire a gun, and Phoenix’s character wields various items in a courtroom to beat people unconscious, for example. But such moments happen during the film’s lavish musical numbers, which are fantastical projections of the two main characters’ inner psyches.

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Profanity, sex and nudity make appearances

The movie’s R rating includes “language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity.” Parents worried about exposing kids to profanity and sex should steer clear. 

Arthur and Lee have a conjugal visit in an Arkham cell, a scene that does not feature nudity. While the intimate moments between Arthur and Lee are consensual, the former does plant two non-consensual kisses on Catherine Keener’s Maryanne Stewart, his lawyer. Elsewhere amid the brutal conditions at the hospital, characters in the nude can be glimpsed. 

Also worth noting for those sensitive to the depiction of cigarettes: characters smoke in nearly every scene of Folie à Deux. 

The movie’s final scenes feature disturbing content

Following its fanciful musical numbers and grim depictions of incarceration, Folie à Deux builds to an explosive climax — literally, as a car bomb set by terrorists detonates, destroying much of the courthouse where Arthur is being tried for murder. 

And the movie’s final scene ups the violence significantly with the sudden introduction of a new villain. Arthur, led from his cell by a guard who wanders off, is confronted by another inmate who proceeds to tell him a joke. Major spoilers follow: the mystery inmate punctuates his punchline by stabbing Arthur in the gut repeatedly. The man with the alter ego of Joker collapses in a gruesomely bloody heap and dies, while the inmate laughs — and, out of focus and almost out of frame, cuts his own mouth into a wider smile. 

Joker: Folie à Deux, which costars Brendan Gleeson, Leigh Gill, Zazie Beetz, Sharon Washington and Steve Coogan, is in theaters now.