How about another joke, reader? What does someone get when they click on a spoiler-filled post with a SPOILER WARNING right at the beginning, but they read it anyway? They get what they f***ing deserve.
Anyway, one of the biggest mysteries in Joker was what EXACTLY happened to Zazie Beetz's character, Sophie, after her and Arthur's (Joaquin Phoenix) genuinely terrifying final interaction.
Let me just refresh your memory really quick: During the entire first two acts of the film, the audience is led to believe that Arthur and Sophie are dating...
...Except that they're not, and their relationship took place entirely in Arthur's mind. This is revealed after he has a particularly "bad day" and walks into Sophie's apartment looking for her to comfort him. Sophie is terrified by his presence, and it quickly becomes clear that she only knows him in a passing sense, and not in the intimate way we believed.
They have a short-but-incredibly tense interaction with Sophie begging Arthur to leave and not hurt her or her young daughter and then...it cuts to Arthur storming down the apartment building hallway while VERY frightening music BLARES, and it is left up to the audience to interpret what the heck happened.
And, TBH, people were pretty much right down the middle with their guesses:
JOKER SPOILERS . . . . . Do y'all think Arthur killed Sophie?
But, wonder no longer because this week the film's cinematographer, Lawrence Sher, revealed in an interview with /Film that Sophie and her daughter did, in fact, LIVE.
“We wanted to make the interpretation of what's real versus what’s not real a part of the viewer’s experience,” Sher said. “For instance, how his relationship to Sophie is a fantasy to him."
"Some people have asked me, ‘Was she killed?’ but Todd [Phillips] makes it clear she WASN'T killed," Sher said. "Arthur is killing people who’ve wronged him in a certain way, and Sophie never wronged him."
"We leave hints [at what is real and not real] using imagery, or the way we covered scenes similarly between scenes," Sher said. "Outside of that, I like that people can...come to their own conclusions."
So, there ya have it! And while I personally kind of suspected/hoped this was the case...I don't know, y'all, that use of music and framing SCARED me for a minute, and it's nice to have it confirmed! Also, someone please nominate Sher for an Oscar because, WOW, that cinematography, though.
