YMMV / I Care a Lot

• Actor Shipping: Some of the film's fans cite the chemistry between Rosamund Pike and Eiza González as one of the key pulls. It's helped by Pike and González being close and oddly flirtatious with each other in the film's press junket, such as addressing each other as "my wife" during interviews.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Mr. Feldstrom a misogynist, or is he simply spewing whatever anger he can at the person who has kidnapped his mother?
• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's a film about a con artist who "legally" kidnaps elderly people from their homes and families for profit, her victims are never given any true justice and are actually treated unsympathetically at times, and the people who oppose her are just as bad. Of course some people were turned off from the get-go.
• Catharsis Factor: The movie makes you think it's going to be an extremely brutal case of The Bad Guy Wins or Karma Houdini ...until the very last minute when Marla, who's been nothing but an unfathomably loathsome monster, is shot dead. This allegedly was said to have made most audiences actually cheer and applaud.
• Critical Dissonance: While the film enjoyed acclaim from critics, boasting an 81% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it fared worse with audiences, with a 35% audience score. Go on Reddit and you'll mostly find people who absolutely hated it.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Scumbag con artists they are, Marla and Fran genuinely love each other. The brief montage after Marla saves Fran is genuinely touching.
  • Roman and his mother finally reuniting in the end. Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas indeed.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Mr. Feldstrom. While he isn't the most personable of people, he only speaks so rudely to Marla because he is desperately fighting for his mother to be freed from Marla's clutches. He's called a misogynist for it. When his mother dies, few can blame him for going off the edge.
  • Marla. She heavily implies that she used to be poor in her past, grew up with a mother whom she deems as a sociopath, and has also implied that she's been threatened by men all her life.
• Memetic Mutation: Those who watched the film or even the trailers compared it to Gone Girl, saying that it's "natural progression".
• Moral Event Horizon: The opening scene where she kidnaps elderly patients (legally) and steals their possessions left it clear Marla is irredeemable scum from the get go. This proved to be controversial as it makes it clear her victory is a triumph of pure evil and her opponents are no better.
• Paranoia Fuel: Marla's scam of having perfectly healthy elderly people placed in homes to die alone, especially for those close to their grandparents or elderly parents.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The film revolves around systematic elder abuse, so it's doubly uncomfortable for those who are advanced in age or who have elderly parents and care decisions must be made for them. Marla's actions (taking control over her victim's lives and assets, locking them up in abusive nursing homes, restricting contact with their families) make the film especially unsettling because viewers can easily imagine it happening to them or their elderly loved ones.
• Rooting for the Empire: While Roman is the villain of the piece (and most certainly deserves the title), some viewers actively rooted for him to defeat Marla. Part of this came from Marla herself, who some viewers found so despicable that they wanted Roman to win purely out of spite. It also doesn't help that Roman's reason for coming into conflict with Marla (trying to rescue his mother from Marla's unethical custody) is much more sympathetic and understandable than Marla's purely selfish motive of more money.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Some critics have noted Jennifer Peterson is underutilized and thought it would be a more interesting if she fought her own way out. That Dianne Wiest's performance is intense and humorous in the small scenes she has taunting Marla makes this sting more.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Many have noted that the uniqueness of the premise has a lot of potential and have praised the first act which plays like a Kafkaesque legal thriller only to become a fairly generic crime movie once the mafia subplot starts.
  • A private investigator could have made a better and more sympathetic protagonist rather than the shamelessly heartless Marla.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Tough to choose who to root for when your choice is a Con Artist who forcibly removes elderly people from their homes and families and proceeds to steal their life savings, or a crime lord who’s a human trafficker. The fact that in the end they team up and make millions off of the suffering of others and that virtually every character of any note in the film is involved in their crimes in some way makes Marla's murder at the end seem like way too little too late.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Mr. Feldstrom. He's ultimately just trying to save his mother from a lying sociopath, but due to his poor choice of words, Marla accuses him of being a misogynist, which apparently invalidates his legitimate criticisms towards her. When he confronts her again for what is essentially kidnapping, she painfully grabs him by the crotch and threatens him, which can be considered sexual assault. It comes off as a fairly obvious case of Jerks Are Worse Than Villains being played in-universe.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: A Den of Greek critic notes how the film ends with a man wearing a red baseball cap murdering a successful woman. May be Faux Symbolism since he's doing it because she's engaged in elderly abuse and her fortune is built on the destruction of other women.

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