Not one of Madonna’s better phases.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: After nearly thirty years of acting, back in 2021 Maggie Gyllenhaal stepped behind the camera to write and direct her first feature — a heartbreaking novel adaptation called The Lost Daughter, in which Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman each played the same character at different ages, whose personal issues complicated her unenthusiastic young-adult attempts at motherhood and continued haunting her as life grew increasingly lonelier with age. Both actresses were nominated for Academy Awards, as was Gyllenhaal for Best Adapted Screenplay with such a complicated portrait of a woman in no position to deal with the expectations of everyone around her and The Viewers at Home.
Viewers may feel even more confounded by the writer/director’s sophomore follow-up, a big-budget IP-romp called The Bride! that isn’t a novel adaptation and isn’t quite a remake of James Whale’s iconic Bride of Frankenstein…at least, not all of it. Remember the scene where Elsa Lanchester awakens and screaming at Boris Karloff? Imagine that screaming stretched out to a two-hour runtime, except now she’s screaming at everyone except Frankenstein’s Monster, and somehow the screaming and posturing make her a feminist icon. Or something?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 