There’s no question that DC Comics and Warner Bros. Pictures have a massive hit on their hands with the Batman spinoff movie Joker. The only question is: is anything that happened in that movie actually real? Given the nature of the movie and how many of the major plot points are left open to interpretation, many fans are wondering if any of the events happened to take place. After all, the ending puts a lot of the film’s major points into question, and we’re left to wonder if Arthur Fleck actually committed all of those acts of violence we see on the screen.
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One of the biggest questions revolves around the fate of Zazie Beetz character Sophie Dumond, a single mom who was depicted as being friendly with Arthur and even beginning a relationship with him. But at the end, their friendship was revealed to be a product of his imagination, and the movie left fans wondering whether or not Arthur’s violent streak pushed him to kill her or leave her alone.
Now the film’s cinematographer Lawrence Thur has spoken out about the movie during an interview with /Film, revealing whether or not Sophie escaped the Joker’s wrath at the end of the movie.
“We wanted to make the interpretation of the real versus what’s not real, a part of the viewer’s experience,” Sher explained. “For instance, his relationship to Sophie is a fantasy to him. Some people have asked me, ‘Was she killed?’ [Director Todd Phillips] makes it clear she wasn’t killed. Arthur is killing people who’ve wronged him in a certain way, and Sophie never wronged him. In terms of what we did visually to play with the real and not real, there are callbacks and scenes that mirror each other. We leave hints using imagery or way we covered scenes similarly between scene. Outside of that, I like that people can have the conversation and come to their own conclusions.”
This is a somewhat surprising and definitive answer about one of the film’s major mysteries. Filmmaker Todd Phillips has made it clear that he wants audiences to make up their own minds about what actually happens in his DC Comics movie, preferring to let the fans interpret the events rather than spoon feed them what he actually intended.
But now that we have an answer on one of the movie’s biggest mysteries, maybe other people involved will be inclined to reveal their own interpretation of the events.
Joker is now playing in theaters everywhere.
