Why did Lisa bully Daisy, in particular, so much? Is it because Daisy was simply an easy target, was it jealousy as Daisy herself suggests or was it Ho Yay?
Is Lisa actually a sociopath? She fits a lot of the criteria, but the fact that she seems to genuinely care about Susanna (and Jamie) in her own, deeply twisted way could be used to argue that she does have some degree of concern for others, and thus isn't a true sociopath. Plus, it was the sixties — misdiagnoses, especially with young women, weren't exactly uncommon. And, of course, that raises the question, if Lisa isn't a sociopath, what is she?
Daisy doesn't appear to have any psychological issues pertaining to her weight or body image, but she refuses to eat anything other than the rotisserie chickens her dad makes her. The addiction to laxatives to purge and the description of watching others eat is the equivalent to her of them taking a dump (the association of binging/purging) and may be bulimia nervosa or merely be the end result of an all-chicken diet.
Lisa might have Borderline Personality Disorder. Based on what's now understood about BPD, the condition would in fact seem to fit Lisa better than Susannanote who seems to get the BPD label primarily because she's a sexually active woman and therefore considered "promiscuous": people with BPD struggle to empathize with others (which is often misread as the total lack of empathy characteristic of sociopathy or narcissism, even though it doesn't rise to that level), often exhibit impulsive and risky behavior even to their own detriment, have an extreme fear of abandonment, and experience bouts of sudden, inappropriate anger — all of these are way more applicable to Lisa than Susanna. Threatening suicide when faced with a threat of abandonment, which Lisa does several times, is also a behavior that comes up relatively frequently with BPD. (The fact that she shows no guilt or remorse when she sees that Daisy has committed suicide does make her seem like more of a true sociopath, but that could also be her being in denial because she can't face the reality that her actions led to Daisy's death.)
Harsher in Hindsight: After Brittany Murphy's death, Winona Ryder stated that she couldn't watch this movie. Which is understandable given that Daisy (Murphy's character) passed away in the bathroom and how Murphy herself met her end.
Post Stranger Things, Susanna's "Should I stay or should I go?" line becomes this, considering the role the Clash song of that name played in the series.
Les Yay: Lisa and Susanna. Lisa bringing Susanna into her circle and her borderline-stalker behavior towards her comes off as a rather obsessive crush sometimes, and the two of them are rather fixated on each other. Lisa seems to take Susanna's recovery as a personal betrayal, raising the question — does Lisa resent that Susanna's getting better... or that she's going to leave her? The two run away together at one point, which doesn't help, nor does the fact that Lisa has the most Pet the Dog moments towards Susanna. There's also the fact that Susanna forgives Lisa at the end, and says that she wants to see her again, even after all Lisa did. Susanna even kisses her!
Moment of Awesome: The ice cream parlor scene, specifically where Lisa stands up for Susanna after the wife of the professor Susanna had a brief affair with threatens her.
Narm: Many of the arguments and histrionic outbursts can be perceived as this, after a couple of viewings. What's dramatic on the first viewing might induce some eye-rolling in subsequent ones.
The sequence of Lisa interrogating and eventually chasing Susanna after the former reveals the contents of the latter's diary to Polly and Georgina, with Lisa's unpredictable and terrifying behavior and the dark corridors Susanna is chased down making the scene feel ripped out of a horror movie.
Some deleted scenes show some very disturbing hallucinations of Susanna's, such as bending her hand in unnatural positions (this is when she believes that she has "no bones" in her hand), and of blood pouring out of the meat refrigerators at a supermarket. The best example for this trope from the book itself, though, would be when Susanna and a few other inmates go to the Maximum Security Wing to visit someone who was recently transferred from their wing. ...Let's just say there is a very good reason why some of the inmates there were locked up.
Vindicated by History: Despite Angelina Jolie's critically acclaimed performance, reviews upon its initial release were unenthusiastic with many critics deriding it as overly melodramatic. Nowadays, it's viewed as a classic and has gained a sizeable cult following.
Daisy: A victim of sexual abuse, who (in the movie adaptation) is bullied relentlessly by Lisa in her own house, which then triggers her to suicide. And above it all, Lisa shows zero remorse when seeing Daisy's corpse hanging in the bathroom.
Melvin takes the piss a lot, too, but when he arrives after Daisy's death and stands by himself in the rain, contemplating his utter professional failure, you can't help but feel bad for him.
