Arthur Fleck’s laugh isn’t a sound; it’s a symptom. A tracheal collapse, a spasm that rattles an emaciated carcass like a puppet whose strings have been cut. It’s the first, piercing clue that Todd Phillips’s "Joker" has no intention of playing by the rules of the comic-book movie, let alone a villain’s hagiography. Rather, it presents itself as a subjective descent into the inferno, an ultrasound of the West’s ailing soul disguised as an origin story. Phillips, a defector from the world of gross-out comedy who seems to be atoning for the sins of The Hangover with an auteur’s hair shirt, pulls off a transposition as brazen as it is fascinating: he rips the character from Gotham’s mythology and transplants him into the body of 1970s New York cinema. The result is a cinematic séance in which the conjured spirits wear the faces of Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin.

The homage—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, the exegetical tracing—to Martin Scorsese is so explicit it practically becomes a statement of purpose. "Joker" doesn’t converse with Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy; it swallows them whole, digests them, and regurgitates a distilled, contemporary version. The Gotham of 1981 is a synecdoche for pre-Giuliani New York: an open sewer, choked with garbage and a social rage that ferments like an abscess about to burst. In this urban landscape, which seems lifted from a Leon Golub canvas, Arthur Fleck moves like a Kafkaesque figure, an insect crushed by the indifference of a system that has cut funding for social services—his only, fragile safety net. His desire is not the anarchic chaos of Heath Ledger’s Joker, nor the criminal grandeur of Jack Nicholson’s. It is a primal, terribly human need: to be seen. To be acknowledged. Like De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin, Arthur dreams of a television stage—that of the smarmy Murray Franklin (played by a Robert De Niro who brings things full circle, shifting from aspirant to idol)—not for fame, but because that illuminated spotlight is the only place where his invisible existence might acquire a flicker of meaning.

Herein lies the film's first great insight: to transform the genesis of Batman’s greatest adversary into a drama of loneliness and mental illness, a tale that could just as well exist without capes and masks. The work of Joaquin Phoenix is a chapter unto itself, a feat of acting that transcends mimesis to become possession. His body, hollowed out by an inhuman diet, is a map of pain. Every jutting rib, every shoulder blade cleaving the skin, tells a story of deprivation. His dance—awkward and then suddenly liberating—recalls the expressionist contortions of an Egon Schiele figure, a desperate attempt to inhabit a body that feels alien. And then, that laugh. A pathological condition, the pseudobulbar affect, which turns the sound of joy into torture, a short circuit between emotion and expression that isolates him even further from the world. Phoenix doesn’t play a character; he embodies a state of absolute suffering, striking a near-miraculous balance between moving fragility and a creeping unease.

Phillips’s film is an extraordinarily sensitive seismograph, registering the fault lines of our contemporary world. Released in 2019, it captures with frightening precision the anxieties of an era of polarization, populist resentment, and “forgotten men.” Arthur Fleck becomes the epiphenomenon of a mass of invisible people who, deprived of voice and dignity, find in his homicidal and nihilistic act—that first, clumsy explosion of violence on the subway—an unexpected catalyst. The clown mask, once a symbol of forced, professional cheer, is transfigured into an icon of revolt. And it is here that the film becomes more ambiguous, and for that reason, more powerful. It offers neither easy justifications nor moral condemnations. It shows a process, a chemical reaction in which a fragile individual and a sick society combine to create a monster. The work does not glorify violence, but rather investigates its genesis with the coldness of a pathologist, suggesting that monsters, often, are not born, but made.

The narrative structure, moreover, masterfully plays on the unreliability of the narrator, a literary topos with roots reaching back to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Everything we see is filtered through Arthur’s fractured psyche. Is his idyllic relationship with his neighbor (Zazie Beetz) perhaps just a hallucination? Did his triumphant and bloody appearance on Murray Franklin’s show really happen that way? Phillips scatters clues—like the clock in the TV studio that always shows the same time—that force us to question the veracity of every scene. The film itself becomes a twisted diary, an interior monologue that blurs reality and delusion, forcing the viewer to share the protagonist’s disorientation. This choice is not a mere stylistic flourish but the beating heart of the work: if we cannot trust perceived reality, what are the foundations of our morality?

From an aesthetic standpoint, "Joker" is a masterpiece of coherence. Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, with its palette of sickly yellows, muddy browns, and acid greens, plunges Gotham into an oppressive, toxic atmosphere. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is a funereal lament for solo cello, a visceral sound that seems to emerge directly from the depths of Arthur’s despair, becoming the voice of his inarticulate anguish. Every choice, from the film grain that emulates the cinema of Sidney Lumet to the almost fetishistic reconstruction of urban decay, helps to create a closed world with no escape, in which Arthur’s transformation into Joker appears not as a choice, but as the sole, inevitable conclusion.

Of course, such an undertaking is not without its risks. The excessive reliance on Scorsesian models could be read by some as a lack of originality, a virtuosic pastiche that nonetheless lacks a true authorial voice. And yet, it would be a mistake to stop at this interpretation. Phillips doesn’t copy; he re-channels. He uses an established and recognizable cinematic language to tell a profoundly current story, creating a short circuit between nostalgia for a certain kind of adult, committed cinema and the urgency of contemporary themes. He empties the Joker mythos of every comic-book and supernatural element only to fill it with the traumas and neuroses of our time. His Joker is not an agent of chaos, a criminal mastermind, or a psychopathic dandy. He is an empty symbol, a mask onto which a frustrated society projects its own fantasies of revenge. He is the end product of a world that has decided some people simply do not matter. And herein, perhaps, lies his most profoundly terrifying nature: he is not the villain Gotham needs, but the one it frighteningly deserves.