Nicole Kidman is Wasted in a Movie You've Seen Too Many Times

The next comprises spoilers for Holland, premiering March 27, 2025 on Prime Video.

Mimi Cave’s Prime Video movie Holland refers to not the Netherlands — however Holland, Michigan, the place Dutch-Individuals dutifully attend their tulips and each citizen owns a pair of klompen for particular events. Nicole Kidman’s character Nancy Vandergroot teaches residence economics, or “Life Administration,” the place she educates malleable youths within the artwork of find out how to make Dutch child pancakes. The movie’s iteration of Holland is not a spot the place individuals have to handle something, however quite study the traditions that may make it best to go along with the final movement of the city and its individuals.

The stick within the mud is Nancy, who — upon dropping an earring and summarily firing a babysitter — rouses from her passivity with a hellbent verve. Out of the blue she’s alert, paranoid, and begins to search for bother the place, ostensibly, there may be none. As is typical in motion pictures of this sort, Nancy goes from searching for a chunk of misplaced piece of bijou to actively seeing unusual patterns in her husband Fred’s conduct. Nancy recruits her colleague Dave Delgado in her quest to make a boring life extra sophisticated. The standard antics ensue — break-ins, incognito disguises, and many others. — and Cave’s underwhelming critique of the home doldrums comes into stark reduction.

Holland Is a Predictable Film All of the Manner Via

The Struggling Plot Makes the Movie Fall Totally Flat

Holland is lodged someplace between David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (with quite a lot of instantly mimicked pictures), John Waters’ Serial Mother (generally tongue-in-cheek tone), and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Homicide Thriller (in nagging suspicions resulting in sophisticated choices). Waters’ movie appears like essentially the most distinguished affect for Cave, who painstakingly crams every scene in Holland with particulars. They counsel not simply the interval — someday within the early 2000s, with the entire maintained beliefs of the Eisenhower period — however an identical fixation on consumerist conduct and the silliness of maintaining appearances only for the sake of doing so.

Fred — the city’s optometrist performed by Succession star Matthew Macfadyen — maintains a rigorously detailed mannequin of the city and choose areas exterior of its borders, indicating a maniacal fixation on management. In a single damning scene, Fred holds clamps round a miniature determine of a girl whereas he urges his and Nancy’s squeaky son Harry to clip the top. Hobbies alone aren’t sufficient to warrant a radical character investigation, however far more proof of his being unusual is flung at viewers left and proper. Fred interpolates phrases like “foolish goose” and “keen beaver” into his on a regular basis speech, all the time veering towards condescension. He additionally travels to attend conferences which are so thematically uninteresting and simply far sufficient away that Nancy won’t ever tag alongside. It is clear one thing is amiss, however precisely what that’s is Holland‘s central conceit.

The movie’s most fun, however least explored ingredient is the budding relationship between Nancy and Dave, portrayed by Gael Garcia Bernal. From the outset, it is clear that Dave represents a possibility for Nancy to derive some pleasure from life exterior of her chores. Dave, however, is a supportive listener. He is the brand new man on the town with a mysterious previous, however he is additionally the one one who will really tackle the issue when a child comes into class with a bruise round his eye. He is a straightforward object of fascination for Nancy, a tasty different, however the vital discomfort of fleshing out this facet of Holland is nearly fully averted — excluding one pained sentence uttered by Dave. There are too many missed alternatives on this movie.

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Holland Has Loads of Concepts, however Would not Execute Any of Them

The Film Combines Thriller Parts With Home Satire

Nancy, wearing a white print blouse, holds a hand to the wound on her forehead in the movie Holland — Picture through Prime Video

At first, Holland has the mechanics as a thriller. The sunshine prodding of propriety performs second fiddle to the location of Nancy and Dave in variously harmful conditions. The great-hearted makes an attempt at fixing a small thriller give strategy to deviant conduct and extra deviant discoveries. Nonetheless, anybody who’s seen Malice, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, or another 1990s thriller that is predicated on the validation of characters’ worst fears will know find out how to learn the proof that Cave chooses to show. The small print are on the nostril and the filmmaker appears to lack confidence within the viewers’s skill to deal with swifter pivots from one plotline to the subsequent. The movie’s predictability additionally undermines the reveals, in order that viewers are finally given little or no apart from a really temporary moments of wily, genre-be-damned inspiration.

Someplace inside Holland there is a a lot better film, one which peeks from behind a smattering of overt influences. In broad strokes, it is simple to acknowledge bits of Mike Decide’s Extract and Alexander Payne’s Election — each of which discovered profound parts in mundanity due to systematic engagement with not simply the characters, however the societal predicaments that led to their heaps in life. In Cave’s movie, there is no such thing as a existential investigation, no actual concept that is not buried as quickly because it peeks via the tulips. Slice-of-life observations will be discovered, however are sapped of any satirical snap by the snowglobe-like nature of the story. Nancy is given validation not via looking for that means and a few semblance of pleasure, however via a procedural checking of containers that affirms every of her suspicions. In impact, her character is one other cog in a clear array of mechanisms.

plit image of Vincent Price from House on Haunted Hill, David Dastmalchian from Late Night with the Devil and Nicole Kidman from The Others

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Cave deserves no less than a specific amount of commendation for throwing every part into the blender. The huge scope of Holland — the city and its fastidiously maintained codes — is fascinating, particularly contemplating the upcoming Tulip Time competition, however what Fred is as much as takes up the movie’s whole focus. That slim view, and Nancy’s laser-guided conviction that Fred is as much as no good, solely highlights the missed alternatives to make a stronger movie.

In each regard, Holland strikes left as a substitute of proper, choosing the acquainted when even just a few curveball prospers would add a layer of vital texture. The performances, whereas stable, are too acquainted and rigidly adherent to audience-legible ideas and actions. These people aren’t charting a course of their very own volition, however sleepwalking on the course set by Andrew Sodroski’s script. What’s left is a film that telegraphs the entirety of its arc, repeatedly; the one shocking factor is what Harry chooses to take heed to on his CD participant. Cave is actually an fascinating director, keen to throw a wide range of conflicting flavors at audiences, however this specific medley simply tastes bland.

Holland premieres March 27, 2025 on Prime Video.