14 Movies Like Joker (May 2026): Dark Thrillers & Character Studies

When Joker hit theaters in 2019, it did something few comic book films had ever done. It made audiences uncomfortable in the best possible way. Joaquin Phoenix delivered an Oscar-winning performance as Arthur Fleck, a man discarded by society who slowly, painfully unravels. The film grossed over a billion dollars, sparked endless debates about mental health and violence, and left viewers hungry for more stories in that same unsettling vein.

If you have been searching for movies like Joker, you already know the feeling. You want films that get under your skin. Stories about people pushed to the edge, unreliable narrators, and the dark underbelly of society. You want that same slow-burn tension that builds until everything snaps.

Our team spent weeks digging through film catalogs, Reddit threads, and critical analyses to build this list. We watched all 14 films below with one question in mind: does this capture what made Joker so gripping? The result is a curated collection spanning five decades of cinema, organized by the specific themes that connect them to Todd Phillips’ masterwork.

What Makes a Movie Like Joker

Before we get to the list, let’s define what we mean. Joker is not just a comic book movie. It is a character study wrapped in a psychological thriller, fueled by social commentary. Todd Phillips drew heavily from Martin Scorsese’s filmography, 1970s urban dramas, and a tradition of unreliable narrators stretching back to film noir.

The films on this list share at least two of these core elements:

• A protagonist who is isolated, alienated, or rejected by society
• A psychological descent or breaking point
• Social commentary about class, mental health, or systemic failure
• Violence that feels personal rather than spectacular
• An unreliable narrative perspective that questions what is real
• Dark humor or satire blended with genuine dread

With that framework in mind, let’s break these recommendations into thematic groups so you can find exactly the kind of film you are in the mood for.

The Scorsese Connection: Direct Influences on Joker

Todd Phillips never hid his inspirations. He openly cited two Martin Scorsese films as the foundational blueprints for Joker. If you want to understand where Joker came from, these two films are essential viewing.

1. Taxi Driver (1976)

Directed by Martin Scorsese | Starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd

This is the single most important film to watch if you loved Joker. Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro in one of cinema’s defining performances, is a lonely Vietnam veteran driving a cab through the decaying streets of 1970s New York. He cannot connect with people. He cannot sleep. He becomes increasingly unhinged, eventually arming himself and plotting violence.

The parallels to Arthur Fleck are impossible to miss. Both men are isolated in a crowded city. Both keep journals. Both develop dangerous fixations. Both believe they see society’s sickness more clearly than anyone else. The key difference is that Travis fashions himself a savior while Arthur embraces the role of destroyer.

Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver is a masterclass in writing a character who is simultaneously sympathetic and terrifying. Scorsese’s direction captures urban rot with a documentarian’s eye. If Joker left you wanting the original template, this is where you start.

2. The King of Comedy (1982)

Directed by Martin Scorsese | Starring Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard

If Taxi Driver gave Joker its structure and tone, The King of Comedy gave it its plot. Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a wannabe comedian who is absolutely convinced he deserves a spot on a late-night talk show. When his fantasies of stardom collide with rejection, he takes drastic measures.

Arthur Fleck’s dream of becoming a stand-up comedian and his obsession with a talk show host played by Robert De Niro in Joker? That is a direct homage to this film. The obsession with fame, the delusion of talent, the kidnapping plot. Phillips borrowed liberally from The King of Comedy, and watching the original after Joker reveals just how carefully he reconstructed its DNA.

The film is also sharper and darker than you might expect from a comedy starring Jerry Lewis. It satirizes celebrity culture and the desperate need for validation in ways that feel even more relevant in 2026.

Psychological Thrillers: Characters on the Edge

Joker belongs to a long tradition of films about people who crack under pressure. These films feature protagonists whose grip on reality loosens, sometimes gradually, sometimes in a single explosive moment. Each one shares Joker’s interest in the psychology of its central character above all else.

3. Fight Club (1999)

Directed by David Fincher | Starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter

An unnamed office worker drowning in consumer culture discovers an alter ego who gives him everything he has been missing: confidence, purpose, and an outlet for his rage. Before long, that alter ego has built an underground army.

Fight Club and Joker share an unreliable narrator, anti-establishment themes, and a third-act revelation that reframes everything you have seen. Both films were controversial on release and both became cultural touchstones. The biggest difference is tone. Where Joker is somber and tragic, Fight Club is kinetic and darkly funny. But both ask the same uncomfortable question: what happens when a person the system has chewed up decides to bite back?

If the anti-capitalist and anti-society themes of Joker resonated with you, Fight Club takes those ideas and runs with them at full speed.

4. American Psycho (2000)

Directed by Mary Harron | Starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto

Patrick Bateman is a Wall Street investment banker with impeccable taste in business cards, an obsessive skincare routine, and a habit of murdering people in his spare time. Or does he? The genius of American Psycho is that you are never entirely sure which of Bateman’s violent acts are real and which are fantasies born from his crumbling psyche.

Like Joker, American Psycho presents a character study of a deeply disturbed individual living in plain sight. Both films use dark humor to make their protagonists’ actions more unsettling rather than less. And both force viewers into the uncomfortable position of recognizing something familiar in a monster. Christian Bale’s performance walks the same tightrope between pathetic and terrifying that Joaquin Phoenix navigated so brilliantly.

5. Nightcrawler (2014)

Directed by Dan Gilroy | Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed

Lou Bloom is a thief who stumbles into the world of Los Angeles crime journalism, where he discovers he has a talent for filming gruesome accident scenes and selling the footage to local news stations. The more sensational and violent the footage, the higher the price. Lou quickly learns that he can create the stories he films, not just capture them.

Nightcrawler is one of the best descent into madness movies of the 21st century. What makes it so similar to Joker is that Lou Bloom is not a villain in the traditional sense. He is an opportunist who exploits a society that rewards sensationalism and violence. His transformation from desperate hustler to cold-blooded manipulator mirrors Arthur Fleck’s journey from victim to agent of chaos.

Jake Gyllenhaal lost significant weight for the role, and his gaunt, wide-eyed performance has the same unsettling physicality that Phoenix brought to Arthur Fleck.

6. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick | Starring Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates

Alex DeLarge leads a gang of droogs through a futuristic London, committing acts of ultraviolence for pure pleasure. When the government captures him and attempts to reform him through psychological conditioning, the film asks whether forced goodness is any better than chosen evil.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel is one of the most influential villain origin stories in cinema history. Like Joker, it forces you to spend time with a charismatic, violent protagonist and challenges your assumptions about free will, society, and morality. The film’s bold visual style and dark satirical tone set a template that Todd Phillips clearly studied.

The film was so controversial in Britain that Kubrick himself withdrew it from distribution for decades. If Joker’s blend of violence and social commentary appealed to you, A Clockwork Orange takes both elements further.

7. Donnie Darko (2001)

Directed by Richard Kelly | Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Patrick Swayze

A troubled teenager in suburban America starts having visions of a giant rabbit named Frank, who tells him the world will end in 28 days. Donnie begins sleepwalking, committing acts of vandalism, and questioning the nature of time and reality itself.

Donnie Darko shares Joker’s fascination with mental health and the thin line between visionary and psychotic. Both films place you inside the head of a character whose perception of reality may be fundamentally broken. The suburban setting is different from Gotham’s urban sprawl, but the sense of a sick society suffocating an already fragile person is the same.

This is one of those films that rewards multiple viewings. Like Joker, the ending forces you to reconsider everything you thought you understood about the story.

Social Outcasts and Unreliable Narrators

Arthur Fleck was not the first character to be ground down by a world that had no use for him. These films explore what happens when society’s invisible people become impossible to ignore. Each features a protagonist who is pushed past their breaking point by isolation, trauma, or rejection.

8. Falling Down (1993)

Directed by Joel Schumacher | Starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey

William Foster, played by Michael Douglas in one of his most underrated performances, is a recently divorced, unemployed defense worker stuck in Los Angeles traffic on the hottest day of the year. His air conditioning fails. The temperature rises. And something inside him breaks. Over the course of a single day, he walks across the city, leaving a trail of escalating confrontations in his wake.

Falling Down is perhaps the most direct narrative parallel to Joker on this list. An ordinary man, failed by the systems that were supposed to support him, snaps and takes his anger out on the world around him. Both films invite you to sympathize with their protagonist while making you increasingly uncomfortable with their actions. The question both films pose is the same: is this person a villain, or is society the real villain?

Michael Douglas brings the same everyman quality that made Arthur Fleck so relatable and so disturbing at once.

9. You Were Never Really Here (2017)

Directed by Lynne Ramsay | Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola

If you want more Joaquin Phoenix in a role that is spiritually connected to Arthur Fleck, this is your film. Phoenix plays Joe, a traumatized veteran who works as a hired gun rescuing kidnapped girls. He is barely holding himself together, haunted by memories of abuse and war, navigating New York City’s underbelly with a hammer and a death wish.

Lynne Ramsay’s direction is sensory and immersive, putting you inside Joe’s fractured consciousness in ways that echo the subjective camera work in Joker. Phoenix lost weight for this role too, and his gaunt, haunted presence here is a companion piece to his Arthur Fleck. The film is shorter and more elliptical than Joker, but the emotional terrain is strikingly similar.

This is one of the most underrated Joaquin Phoenix movies in his entire filmography, and it belongs on any list of films for Joker fans.

10. The Machinist (2004)

Directed by Brad Anderson | Starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael Ironside

Trevor Reznik has not slept in a year. He is skeletal, haunted by strange notes appearing in his apartment, and convinced that a coworker who nobody else can identify is following him. As his grip on reality weakens, the mystery of what is actually happening deepens.

Christian Bale lost 62 pounds for this role, and his emaciated frame is as shocking and memorable as Phoenix’s physical transformation in Joker. The Machinist is a pure psychological puzzle box about guilt, repression, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive. Like Joker, it uses an unreliable narrator to keep you off balance until the final revelation.

The film’s bleached-out, grey-toned visual palette creates the same oppressive atmosphere as Gotham’s perpetually grimy streets in Joker.

11. One Hour Photo (2002)

Directed by Mark Romanek | Starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan

Robin Williams delivers one of his most chilling performances as Seymour Parrish, a lonely photo lab technician who develops an unhealthy fixation on a family whose pictures he processes. He knows their vacations, their birthdays, their daily routines. He begins to imagine himself as part of their lives, and when his fantasy is threatened, his behavior turns dangerous.

This is the kind of lesser-known gem that most “movies like Joker” lists overlook. One Hour Photo is a slow-burn character study about loneliness and obsession, and Williams plays against type in ways that are genuinely disturbing. Like Arthur Fleck, Seymour is a man who has been invisible his entire life and who reaches a breaking point when the small things that gave him purpose are taken away.

If the creepy, quiet desperation of Joker’s early scenes stayed with you, One Hour Photo operates in the same unsettling register.

Dark Comedies and Satires With a Joker Vibe

Joker has more humor than people remember. It is dark, uncomfortable humor, but it is there in Arthur’s failed comedy routines, in the absurdity of the talk show sequences, and in the film’s satirical take on media and celebrity culture. These films share that tonal balance between comedy and dread.

12. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick | Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden

A rogue general orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, and the American government scrambles to prevent global annihilation. The catch? It is a comedy. Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece finds humor in the darkest possible subject matter, satirizing Cold War politics and military absurdity with razor-sharp wit.

The connection to Joker is one of tone and philosophy. Both films argue that the world is run by fools and that the systems designed to protect us are just as likely to destroy us. Joker’s dark comedy elements, particularly the Murray Franklin show scenes, share Dr. Strangelove’s belief that the only honest response to a broken world is to laugh at it.

13. Heathers (1988)

Directed by Michael Lehmann | Starring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty

Veronica Sawyer is tired of being part of her high school’s most powerful clique, the Heathers. When a mysterious new student named J.D. arrives, he introduces her to a more direct method of dealing with social hierarchies: murder. What starts as dark teenage comedy gradually reveals itself as a sharp critique of social conformity and violence.

Heathers captures the same tonal balance that made Joker so potent. It is funny until it is not. Christian Slater’s J.D. is a charismatic agent of chaos who uses humor and charm to mask his sociopathy, much like Arthur Fleck’s transformation into the Joker. The film’s willingness to find comedy in uncomfortable places makes it a natural companion piece.

14. Parasite (2019)

Directed by Bong Joon-ho | Starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong

The Kim family lives in a cramped basement apartment, barely scraping by. Through a series of deceptions, they gradually infiltrate the wealthy Park family’s household. What begins as a dark comedy about class inequality slowly transforms into something far more sinister.

Parasite and Joker were released the same year and share a deep interest in class struggle and social commentary. Both films explore what happens when the gap between rich and poor becomes so extreme that desperate people take extreme measures. Bong Joon-ho and Todd Phillips both use genre conventions to smuggle in sharp critiques of economic inequality.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or and Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Joker won the Golden Lion at Venice and two Oscars. The fact that both films dominated awards season in 2026 tells you something about how powerfully their themes resonated with audiences worldwide.

Where to Start if You Loved Joker

Fourteen films is a lot to choose from, so here is a quick guide based on what specifically drew you to Joker:

If you loved the psychological depth: Start with Taxi Driver, then watch The Machinist and You Were Never Really Here.

If you loved the dark humor: The King of Comedy is essential, followed by American Psycho and Heathers.

If you loved the social commentary: Parasite and Falling Down tackle class and societal failure from different angles. Nightcrawler takes on media exploitation.

If you want the closest overall experience: Taxi Driver is the gold standard. It is the film Joker most directly references, and it remains one of the greatest character studies ever made.

Most of these films are available on major streaming platforms, though availability changes frequently. Checking your preferred streaming service for current availability is the fastest way to start watching.

Why These Films Stay With You?

There is a reason people keep searching for movies like Joker years after its release. The film tapped into something primal: the fear that any of us, given the wrong circumstances and the wrong combination of abandonment and betrayal, could end up like Arthur Fleck. These 14 films explore that same fear from different angles and across different decades.

What makes this collection of films endure is their refusal to offer easy answers. They do not tell you whether to sympathize with their protagonists or condemn them. They simply show you what happens when society fails its most vulnerable people, and they let you sit with the discomfort.

Whether you start with the Scorsese classics that inspired Joker or branch out into the psychological thrillers and dark comedies on this list, you will find films that challenge you, disturb you, and stay with you long after the credits roll.

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