Joker

Arthur Fleck is a struggling clown and aspiring comedian in a decaying Gotham City, caring for his mother while managing a mental illness and losing access to services and medication. Mockery, poverty and betrayal accumulate until he breaks, and he is remade into a violent public figure.

The film brings together psychiatric neglect, maternal delusion and a fractured identity to trace a psychotic break and the emergence of a persecutory figure. It gives a therapist a bleak case study in how abandonment and untreated illness can turn inward and then outward. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2019.