If there’s one thing about our Nicole Kidman, it’s that she’s going to work!
Fresh off three of last year’s buzziest shows (Expats, Lioness and The Perfect Couple) and a criminally Oscar-oversighted performance in the erotic drama Babygirl, the perennially busy actress/producer is at the centre of another twisted thriller of sorts in Prime Video’s freshly acquired SXSW title Holland.
Directed by Mimi Cave, who caused quite the stir out of the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 with her cannibalistic chiller Fresh, Holland benefits from Kidman’s commitment to the material – penned by Andrew Sodorski – which is admittedly less ferocious than what Cave has dished out prior, but still revels in a certain unnerving suburban atmosphere.
Seemingly encapsulating a perfect existence in Holland, Michigan, Kidman feels right at home with the genre strands at play as Nancy Vandergroot, a local high school teacher and idyllic homemaker, who has that archetypal nuclear family everyone would seem to strive for; at least on the surface. Nancy appears all too happy to uphold the wife and mother expectations placed upon her by both her young son, Harry (Jude Hill), and community pillar husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen).
After a missing earring debacle that results in Nancy losing Harry’s favourite babysitter (Rachel Sennott in the epitome of a cameo appearance), her curious nature gets the better of her as she searches the house and starts to look into her husband’s many out-of-town work conferences and what it could possibly mean; she notes to fellow teacher Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal) that he goes to a lot of conferences for an optometrist. Dave is initially helpful in a kindly manner that tries to ease Nancy’s worry, but he is soon dragged into her web of intrigue as she spirals into a state of distress, believing Harry is having an affair and must be far more kink-minded than he lets on at home.
Where it all leads to may or may not prove satisfying in its actuality, but Cave laces the film with a certain creepiness as she accentuates the town’s communal nature and adopts a series of perplexing dream sequences to drive home Nancy’s increasingly altered psyche. It’s not as thought-provoking as a David Lynch feature would’ve been, but there is that blend of confusion and discomfort throughout Holland that brings to mind some of the late auteur’s work.
That being said, without giving away the reveal of Nancy and Dave’s findings, Sodorski’s script doesn’t delve into the psychology of it all in a manner that’s particularly satisfying. It also extends its runtime unnecessarily, so after the eventual reveal there’s still substantial wiggle room left that it breaks much of the momentum the film garnered after its intriguing tease. There’s potential here for something truly subversive, but it unfortunately plays it all a little too safe, which is rather ironic given what unfolds across its 108 minutes.
There’s entertainment here, nonetheless. Kidman always connects herself to interesting stories, regardless of how smoothly they’re executed, and as much as Cave doesn’t match her own freak here in the wake of Fresh, a female filmmaker helming something as ambitious as Holland deserves its flowers, even if – as this film shows us – there might be something sinister buried underneath that bouquet.
THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Holland is now streaming on Prime Video.
