Anarchy and self-loathing: 10 movies like ‘Joker’ worth watching
If Warner Bros had gotten its way then Joker never would have happened, with the studio trying to dissuade director from Todd Phillips from making a modestly budgeted and R-rated psychological thriller using one of the company’s marquee characters.
Instead, the filmmaker stuck to his guns, channelled the spirit of Martin Scorsese, and ended up helming the highest-grossing R-rated release in cinema history, and the first to ever clear a billion dollars at the box office. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the boardroom must have been relieved they let Phillips go ahead.
Joker also won Joaquin Phoenix an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ and earned Hildur Guðnadóttir an Oscar for ‘Best Original Score’, securing a further nine nominations including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Free from the shackles of his iconic arch-nemesis, the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ took centre stage in spectacular style.
With hotly-anticipated sequel Folie à Deux scheduled for release in October 2024, many Joker supporters will be revisiting the original. However, once that’s out of the way, there are plenty more movies that tick very similar boxes that make for excellent companion pieces in their own way.
Movies with obsessive antagonists like Joker
One of the easiest and most obvious places to start after watching Joker is to head right towards another comic book blockbuster featuring the ‘Jester of Genocide’, and it’s equally fitting that Phoenix emulated Heath Ledger by winning an Oscar when nobody thought his performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight could ever be topped.
Continuing on in that vein, the Batman Begins sequel’s leading man Christian Bale makes an eminently watchable and chillingly obsessive central figure in American Psycho, with Patrick Bateman and Arthur Fleck having plenty in common as outsiders who march to the beat of a worldview nobody around them can see or share.
Robin Williams plays excellently against type in the haunting One Hour Photo as Sy Parrish, who becomes dangerously obsessed with a family he’s watched grow up in front of him from a distance, not entirely dissimilar to the way Phoenix constantly imagines interactions and relationships that don’t even exist.
There’s got to be some Scorsese in there, too, with Robert De Niro’s Max Cady a fearsome force of nature in Cape Fear, while Jake Gyllenhaal trawls the seedy underbelly of a densely-populated metropolis in search of meaning in Nightcrawler, hardly a million miles away from Arthur’s desperation to find his own place in Gotham City.
Movies that shine a light on society’s dark side like Joker
No Joker-associated recommendations are complete without Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, both of which were instrumental in forming the vision Phillips had in mind. Take Travis Bickle and Robert Pupkin, toss them into a blender, and sprinkle on some comic book flourishes. What comes out on the other side is pretty much Arthur Fleck.
Phoenix’s protagonist follows a path that isn’t a million miles away from Michael Douglas in Falling Down, either, with the put-upon everyman pushed to the limit by a life and society that couldn’t give a shit about those struggling to make ends meet, forcing him into some drastic measures when he finally snaps.
For a spiritual companion that boasts the same leading man and packs a very similar punch, Lynne Ramsay’s searing You Were Never Really Here sends Phoenix out onto the streets in search of justice and retribution, one who isn’t interested in the notion of compromise when setting out to achieve his goal.
Adding a thread of connective tissue, one of Phoenix’s predecessors under the makeup is in Oscar-winning form in a classic that focuses on the plight of the downtrodden and how society has a habit of turning its back on its most overlooked and vulnerable members, so segueing from Joker straight into Jack Nicholson’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t as far-fetched as it might appear at first glance.
10 movies to watch like Joker:
- The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
- American Psycho (Mary Harron, 1999)
- Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991)
- One Hour Photo (Mark Romanek, 2002)
- Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)
- Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
- The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982)
- Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993)
- You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2017)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1974)
