Holland review: Nicole Kidman domestic thriller has a great idea but fumbles the execution

Holland, Michigan is a real place.

The tulip-dotted American town has a working windmill, cutesy European design and a Dutch pottery store. Settled by Dutch Calvinist separatists in the mid-19th century, it has retained a strong connection to that cultural heritage.

Travel publications will use words such as “quaint”, “idyllic” and “picturesque” to describe it.

The charm and Midwestern friendliness is the lifestyle it’s selling, but that stultifying respectability strangles anything which deviates from “perfect”, including the real-life historical context of the settlers that forced the area’s native people out.

It’s an ideal setting for a thriller that borrows from The Stepford Wives and To Die For. Like the tulips, anything which wilts, droops or doesn’t conform must be hidden or excised.

The film is called Holland, which dropped the “Michigan” part at some point in the decade-long production process. Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen and Gael Garcia Bernal, it’s been billed as a Fargo-esque suburban caper.

Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman) is wife to Fred (Macfadyen) and mother to Harry (Jude Hill) in Holland. There’s nothing remarkable about the Vandergroots and that’s the point. Nancy is a teacher and joins in on all the community activities such as pancake breakfasts while Fred is the town optometrist.

At home, Fred shares his passion for model towns with Harry, a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked cherubic kid who, if he kept really still, could pass for a wooden figure, especially when decked out in his Dutch dancing costume. It would be wholesome if Fred didn’t explain that a model town allows him to “control” everything.

Red flag number one.

She is all smiles on the outside, but on the inside, Nancy’s emotions are roiling, and her dreams are kind of terrifying.

She becomes suspicious that Fred is cheating with his constant travelling for conferences, and with the help of a fellow teacher, new arrival Dave (Bernal), she starts an investigation, and an affair, which unpicks the fabric of life as she knew it.

Holland has been knocking about since it appeared in 2013 on the Black List, which collates the most promising unproduced screenplays. It soon entered into production with Naomi Watts, Bryan Cranston and Edgar Ramirez to star and Errol Morris to direct but as happens in Hollywood, it stalled and then eventually abandoned.

Kidman, her production company Blossom Films, Amazon Prime Video and director Mimi Cave entered the picture in 2022.

There clearly was something there in Andrew Sodorski’s script, a gem of a premise and a callback to 90s-era marriage thrillers. Holland is even set in 2000, apparent from the Nokia phones and the Windows 95 saver. The regressive social structure is, unfortunately, timeless.

It’s the kind of film that used to be a staple in the cinema, a paranoid domestic twister hinged on whether Nancy is just amped up or if there really is something going on. As a viewer versed in the tropes of “if it looks too good to be true, it must be”, you know there is, right?

Holland is, at turns, comedic, and Kidman has the range to play the wild-eyed and panicked character while the intentionally opaque Fred wastes Macfadyen’s talents. Bernal, as effective in comedic roles as he is in drama, is smart casting.

But no amount of great actors or impressive production design can save Holland from its disjointedness. Rather than carefully weaving Coen-esque absurdity with Hitchcockian thrills, it jumps from one to another without care.

The pacing is off and the reveal comes too late, and by then, you don’t even care. The final act is a complete mess, unable to balance or calibrate the tonal demands of switching gears.

It’s a shame because the appetite for this genre definitely exists. The idea was there but the execution was not.

Rating: 2.5/5

Holland is on Prime Video