There’s a scene in the searing Amazon Prime series “Expats” where Nicole Kidman‘s character, a moneyed American living in Hong Kong, breaks into her neighbor’s apartment, convinced he’s perhaps kidnapped her missing son. Rifling through his personal effects, she picks up a pair of binoculars and holds them to her face, apropos of nothing, to perhaps see what the neighbor might’ve seen from out the window across the way. Or perhaps, to understand, “What are binoculars? How do they work?” It’s an unintentionally comic moment, and it’s pretty much what’s happening for the entirety of Amazon Prime Video’s latest partnership with Kidman and her Blossom Films, “Holland.”
Kidman here plays another, less fortunate housewife, Nancy Vandergroot, in Mimi Cave’s thriller, and as in the ill-conceived but retrospectively campy 2004 remake of Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives,” she’s back to the cookie-cutter, picket-fenced world of pruning perfect tulips to unearth the ugliness beneath them. Director Mimi Cave showed filmmaking promise with her 2022 horror comedy “Fresh,” wherein a woman discovers her hot boyfriend may be a cannibal. While her taste for the garish and grotesque is on full display in the goldenrod-hued land of Holland, Michigan, Cave’s work here is weighed down by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-penned script that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get going. Then, the movie is over.
Nancy is a saucer-eyed tradwife and home economics teacher in a fictional, whimsical Dutch-influenced town adorned by windmills and bonnets where life, as Nancy says is “like carbon monoxide, sleepy and comfortable.” Her seemingly easy-breezy husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), is an optometrist, and that’s ironic, right, because he can’t see her. Meanwhile, their young son, Harry (Jude Hill), is arriving at that age where he might prefer a sleepover with friends to movie-and-pizza night with his mom. Oh, for reasons that aren’t explained or suggested beyond nostalgia for its own sake, “Holland” is set in the year 2000, and we’re left to figure this out based on small anachronistic clues: The Windows 2000 icon undulating on Nancy’s desktop, or the Blockbuster DVD she rents, or the moment where she sings Annie Lennox’s 1995 chart-topping cover “No More I Love You’s” alone at home, a private reverie to remember simpler times.
It’s an intriguing idea that almost suggests “Holland” will end up something closer to M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village,” where Holland, Michigan, is a fake utopian bubble to which Nancy has submitted herself. But Sodorski’s script is far more conventional, playing out like a straightforward domestic thriller, once Nancy loses an earring and inadvertently discovers boxes of Polaroids amid Fred’s things that give the inkling something isn’t right with this world. Or hers. She has a perhaps too-close friendship with her colleague, Dave (Gael García Bernal), who’s all too willing to aid her in an amateur investigation as her curiosity starts to terrorize her, and she thinks Fred might be up to something awful.
And it turns out he is. But “Holland” takes so long to get us there that we’ve already caught up to future events by the time it does. “Holland” certainly has candy-colored style going for it, with “Midsommar” and “Hereditary” cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski venting tranquil horror and a few inspired images into the dismal suburban nightmare, like dreamtime hallucinations that drop Nancy into the model-train universe Fred and Harry have been creating upstairs. Or when Dave has a vision of being consumed by Pomeranians after a particular moment of guilt and a grisly revelation. But frustratingly, the film‘s best moments — as are often the case in schlocky thrillers with an A-list below-the-line pedigree — are in fact only dream sequences, tugging at an illusion of a deeper, more surreal world below the otherwise prosaic one “Holland” paints on the surface.
Kidman’s performance is blusteringly panicked enough, though in a filmography that boasts one all-timer after another as well as a churn of duds such as this one, the stain of “Holland” won’t impact it. She’s adept at vaulting between pre-“Feminist Mystique” Stepford ditziness and a more keyed-in, modern woman, but what’s happening around her doesn’t make a clog’s worth of sense. Why does Fred, again, an optometrist, not recognize the man trailing him and standing before him as not only his wife’s dear colleague, but also the only person of color in town? Dave’s place in the community does not make for a great inconspicuous accomplice, especially as Dave and Nancy’s feelings for each other start to get messy and in the way. Nor is Nancy, who takes to wearing a baseball cap hiding out in Dave’s car to stalk her husband and discover he’s possibly been up to something murderous.
The stops and starts “Holland” has had along the way — including Errol Morris once being attached to direct the project as early as 2013, and the film once being called “Holland, Michigan” — have been well-covered. The end result is an incoherent jumble that clearly got lost in the edit, or was it rescued by it? There’s a decent movie in here somewhere, but you’d be digging up a lot of tulips to get to it.
Grade: C
“Holland” premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Amazon Prime Video debuts the film on March 27.
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