I experience it with my girlfriend always how different perception can be. She always notices every little detail no matter what, remembers it and could explain it in detail afterwards while my brain works more like its perceiving the big picture focused on supposedly "important" little things like facial expressions but rarely on for example stuff in the background my brain considers at not important.
It is the case that women do tend – at the group level of course – to consciously notice body language more than men do (and to be clear, significant variation in this trait exists at the individual level). If prompted to describe her character, most everyone would say that Elspeth had "something bothering her", and was "hiding something important and troubling", but they wouldn't always be able to point to all the visual cues that establish this feeling in the audience. However, those small details do add up, and become very important in establishing and reinforcing the reality of who she is.
Personally, I'm more like you, and I rarely notice this kind of thing on first watch/read/listen. And that's actually a good thing, because it means I'm still able to genuinely enjoy various media directly and in an honest fashion. However, if a story really catches my interest, like in the case of
STWA: Unbroken, then I will sometimes go back and try to understand what was done so effectively to make me care and believe in the world and its characters. This type of analysis becomes a way to enjoy the work more, by trying to catch stuff I missed. That understanding may help me notice a few more things as the story continues, but luckily it doesn't fundamentally change the way I engage with media, and I can still just get drawn into a world instantly when I start reading again. Even the stuff I write, or the music I compose...I can still experience it later in a direct way, without thinking of it at a meta level, which is very handy.
I also sometimes do this with things that fail to hold my interest, although usually not in as much depth. And one of the ways that these works can occasionally fail is in a series of what might best be described as: "small missed opportunities". It often isn't so much what they
did that is the problem. It's what they
didn't do that creates a disconnect, and why the viewer/reader's mind suddenly starts to wander while experiencing a piece of fiction, or why the listener's brain grows bored when hearing a piece of music.
In the end, perception and enjoyment of art is a very interesting and complicated subject to ponder.
