YMMV / Changeling

• Complete Monster:
  • Chief James E. Davis is responsible for the entire corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, enabling the city's crime for profit, while even having the mayor in his pocket. Creating The Gun Squad made up of the most violent officers, Davis encouraged and led a massacre of dozens of people without trials to be murdered on the streets to build up their profits, while sending any women who cause problems to a ward where they are drugged and shocked to keep silent. After having Captain J.J. Jones deal with Christie Collins when she tries to uncover their scandal, Davis attempts to throw Jones under the bus to ensure he's kept safe.
  • Dr. Johnathan Steele runs the ward that the women, including Christie, are sent by the police, where he shows himself to be an unethical sadist. Gaslighting and manipulating the women into thinking they're crazy, Steele has them abused and drugged to keep them submissive and even electrocutes them further, leaving some women brain dead. With Christie the next intended victim, Dr. Steele attempts to get her to sign a waiver confirming she was wrong about the police department and, despite being forced to let the women go, received no further consequences for his actions, and even attempts to force Christie to sign the waiver one final time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film's title is a reference to the changelings of fairy lore. Angelina Jolie would later go on to play a certain evil fairy.
• Moral Event Horizon: While Northcott obviously crossed it a long time before the film, YMMV over when Jones crosses it. Certainly by the time he has Christine committed to the psychopathic ward, he's gone far past any point where he could convince himself he was trying to help her, and his own expression as she's dragged away shows that he's aware he's crossed the line. All involved in that scandal have crossed it by that time — Chief Davis, Mayot Cryer, Hutchins, and the most obvious example is Doctor Steele, who has made a living by incarcerating women who happened to be a liability for some accomplice.
• Nightmare Fuel: Sanford's confession to the police makes the one from Se7en look like a church book club discussion.
  • Any parent who watches this movie will have a hard time sleeping afterwards.
• Paranoia Fuel: The police can replace your missing child with a random runaway, convince everybody in your neighborhood that your protests as to his real identity are not just wrong, but signs of abuse from you, and eventually throw you into a mental institution without a warrant just to shut you up. And this really happened.

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