By Karl Quinn
Holland
Amazon Prime Video
★★★
Nicole Kidman may be one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, but it has never stopped her making choices far more in keeping with someone just starting out. Her preference has long been for quirky, sometimes bold, tales from interesting writers and directors, in which marriages come under pressure, sexual desire takes unusual forms, and surface appearances are rarely to be trusted.
Nicole Kidman as Nancy Vandergroot in Holland.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
At their best – think Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995), Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004) and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024) – Kidman makes films that are fascinating, challenging and often divisive. Holland is not quite of that calibre, but it has plenty to offer all the same.
Kidman plays Nancy Vandergroot, who seems, when we first meet her, to be living a life of pure domestic bliss in the quaint Dutch-styled town of Holland, Michigan, in the year 2000.
“I look around myself, and it feels like a dream,” she says in voiceover in the opening minutes, while posing for a kitschy family snap in full tulip-gathering costume. “Before I came here I was afraid and I was confused and I just couldn’t trust anyone, even myself … sometimes I still wonder – is it even real?”
That’s the question that animates everything that follows: is the story she’s told herself real; is the life she’s living really what she desires; is the affair she suspects her optometrist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), is having a figment of her imagination; is the mystery she thinks she’s unearthed merely the projection of a woman bored to death by the very thing she thought she wanted?
Training day: Matthew Macfadyen as Fred and Jude Hill as the couple’s son Harry.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
“I wasn’t in a good place when we met,” she tells Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal), a fellow teacher at the local high school. “It wasn’t anything serious, just a small town, trapped, going nowhere.”
Fred rescued her, she tells him, put her in a box of safety and security. “And it was good for me, the box. I needed it, held me together.”
That is the narrative Nancy tells herself. But it’s not the only one. Now, that box is starting to feel like a prison. Her dream life tells her she is drowning. Her fantasy life leads her to flirt with, conspire with and ultimately fool around with Dave. But is Dave right when he suspects she’s not as serious as she professes – that she’s merely treating him as this “brown boy that you can play with” while maintaining the trappings of her respectable existence?
As she tiptoes through the tulips of her home town trying to unravel the mystery – or the life she has built – it’s never quite clear if any of it exists beyond the windmills of her mind. And that’s the film’s weakness and its strength.
Holland is the second feature from director Mimi Cave, whose Fresh mixed romance and cannibalism to good effect. She directs with style, and handles the transitions from suburban satire to sex comedy to mystery reasonably well, but the screenplay from Andrew Sodroski (one of the creators of the Manhunt: Unabomber series) never quite outruns its influences.
And they are big: Blue Velvet, The Stepford Wives, The Postman Always Rings Twice. If Holland is a little derivative, at least it’s standing on the shoulders of giants. Little wonder it has some trouble maintaining its balance.
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