No One Knows What They’re Doing in Holland

Holland, Michigan, is a real town, though you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s a fictional creation when watching Holland, a baffling thriller starring Nicole Kidman that’s now streaming on Amazon Prime. Director Mimi Cave shoots the place like it’s a highly specialized area of Epcot Center, a recreation of a Dutch-themed midwestern community whose residents are unaware they’re in a theme park. The sun is always shining, the grass is always vibrant, and the Tulip Festival (the longest running in the U.S.!) always on the horizon. The characters move as though they’re gliding through syrup instead of air — as though the sanctuary of Americana they inhabit had been canned and preserved like fruit. Kidman’s character, Nancy Vandergroot, even talks about her life as if it’s some somnolescent idyll, murmuring “I look around myself, and it feels like a dream.” The unreality makes a high-concept reveal feel inevitable, whether it’s a Don’t Worry Darling scenario where the characters are living in a simulated reality or some kind of Stepford Wives situation where half the residents are either robots or have been brainwashed into docile perfection. But I am here to tell you that if you are waiting on that kind of plot development, you will wait in vain. While there is a twist in Holland, it’s of the standard darkness-lurking-beneath-suburbia variety that makes the film’s stylistic choices all the more bonkers. “Hallucinatory utopia” is, it turns out, just how Nancy sees her world.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone. This was evident, but a more minor issue, in her 2022 cannibal-thriller debut, Fresh, which never found its satirical edge despite a fantastic nightmare foodie-bro turn from Sebastian Stan. In this new film, though, it proves to be a disaster that leaves you feeling like the actors are all floundering to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. As Nancy, a mother, wife, and high-school home-ec teacher, Kidman opts for a childlike naïveté, approaching her character’s suspicions that her husband is cheating on her with a Nancy Drew–esque girl-detective enthusiasm. As Fred, the town’s ophthalmologist as well as the possibly philandering spouse, Matthew Macfadyen retreats into the weaponized blandness he’s come to specialize in. And as Dave Delgado, the shop teacher who becomes Nancy’s confidant, Gael García Bernal tries to echo Kidman’s bubbly innocence, though he’s also tasked with flare-ups of ugliness that make this approach jarring. (Dave and Nancy eventually fall in love; Kidman is never one to overlook a short king.) The film takes place in 2000, though its Pleasantville sheen and its characters’ near-lobotomized quality makes it feel like it’s supposed to be set in an alterna-1950s.

Holland’s screenplay, which was written by Manhunt co-creator Andrew Sodroski, was one of the Blacklist projects that rattled around for years, almost getting made (Errol Morris was originally attached to direct). Sometimes highly rated Blacklist scripts feel like they were made to be read rather than produced, but if you squint, you can see the appeal of Holland’s. There’s a Coen brothers quality to its depiction of Nancy and Dave’s adventures, to the way that taking up the mantle of amateur private investigators to figure out what Fred is up to provides the pair with intrigue and excitement — part Fargo, part The Man Who Wasn’t There. But Holland doesn’t have that sense of control, or the necessary wryness. It is, I suppose, ultimately a movie about a white woman’s complacency, though to show that as a state of dreamlike innocence, a sleepwalking through life, functions more as an excuse for her mind-set than a means of illuminating it. The reason that Holland feels like it’s always on the verge of some grander reveal, some rupture that explains its own heightened artificiality, is that it never allows us to understand its main character, that dark place she claims she was in before she met her husband, why she’s so intent on feeling safe, and whether what she’s been feeling up to this point is numbness or contentment. No one involved with Holland seems to understand what they’re up to at all — which is fine for Kidman, the hardest-working woman in Hollywood at the moment, who’s already moved on to the next thing.