YMMV / The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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• Complete Monster: Anthony "Tony" Shepard is a charming man rescued from a mob lynching by Doctor Parnassus's troupe. Claiming to suffer from memory loss, Tony keeps his past as an abusive head of an international children's charity hidden from the troupe while swindling their clients. Outed in the mind-reading Imaginarium for his misdeeds, Tony is also revealed to have used the children he "rescued" for a massive organ trafficking operation, his crimes so disgusting Mr. Nick himself insists on claiming his soul for Hell.
• Evil Is Cool: Mr. Nick, played by the incomparable Tom Waits, and arguably Tony.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Also, given the amount of grief the tabloids gave Heath Ledger, before and after his death, this was a humdinger:
    "Don't believe everything you read. Especially The Mirror."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The future Spider-Man struggles to swing under a bridge to rescue somebody.
  • In a dark fashion, the tarot card that predicts our heroes finding Heath Ledger is a man hanging from one leg, just as the Joker ended up.
  • In this film, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp play the same character, which they would do again in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And then when Jude Law was cast as the young Dumbledore for the sequel, it's like the three actors who took over the late Heath Ledger's role are now in the same film.
• Magnificent Bastard: Mr. Nick, the Devil himself, is Parnassus' charming and affable nemesis. Hundreds of years prior, Nick made a deal with Parnassus, stating that in exchange for immortality, any child of the latter would belong to Nick when they turned 16. Three days before Parnassus' daughter Valentina turns 16, Nick appears to make a new deal stating that Parnassus can keep his daughter if he can use his Imaginarium to win over five souls before Nick can. When Parnassus successfully wins over four souls, Nick claims the souls of four Russian Gangsters who enter Parnassus' Imaginarium and traps them. After Valentina offers herself up as the fifth soul, Nick makes yet another deal with Parnassus: Valentina's Soul in exchange for the wicked Tony Shepard's, partially out of disappointment with an easy victory and partially out of disgust towards Tony being an organ-harvesting child trafficker. Nick keeps his word after Parnassus tricks Tony into hanging himself, freeing Valentina's soul, though keeping Parnassus in the dark regarding her location.
• Misaimed Fandom: The song "Children of the World" was Terry Gilliam's stab and parody at Michael Jackson's song "We Are the World", but eventually won an award to Gilliam's chagrin.
• Moral Event Horizon: Throughout the film, Tony comes across as likeable, despite hints at a dark and shady past that likely involved defrauding a charity. After it is revealed that Tony's charity harvested the organs of Third World children and sold them off to rich Western buyers, his facade cracks and shows just how nasty he really is.
• Nightmare Fuel: Tom Waits' computer-animated face on a giant computer-animated cobra. Pleasant dreams.
• No Yay: Despite sixteen being the age of consent in the UK, some viewers might be a tad uncomfortable with the much older Tony wooing and eventually sleeping with a teenage girl. True, Lily Cole was 21 at the time of filming, but the in-context cradle robbery is still intact.
• Retroactive Recognition: Anton is Spider-Man! And one of the shoppers is Brienne of Tarth and Captain Phasma! Additionally, one of the paramedics who looks at Parnassus near the end is Big Mac.
• She Really Can Act: Lily Cole actually plays Valentina very convincingly. Usually models aren't known for being actors, but she's a model who can act.
• So OK, It's Average: A rare positive example - several critics praised Terry Gilliam for being able to salvage a good, if not great, movie despite Heath Ledger's death, a situation where most directors would have given up... which in itself makes the movie a Moment of Awesome for Terry Gilliam.
• Squick: The relationship between Valentina and Tony has this effect on some viewers; see No Yay above.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The contest to gain five souls could have been drawn out, with more time and focus given more focus to winning each of the five, and developing different methods of winning people's heart's desires, for good or for bad. However, most of the souls are won within fifteen minutes (with a good part of them taking place offscreen), with each side winning a set of four largely identical characters in the same scene.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Faust on acid.

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