Holland (2025)

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Gael García Bernal
written by Andrew Sodroski
directed by Mimi Cave

by Walter Chaw Mimi Cave’s Holland is a Fargo knock-off, a quirky fable of midwestern misbehavior featuring middle-aged frumps (and their satellite nebbishes) at the eye of tweedy flare-ups of droll and bloody devilry. In order to work, these grand chamber guignols of crime need to walk a delicate cornice above a yawning arctic crevasse, careful not to slip off into self-parody or, worse, a deadly unsureness of foot. Imagine listening to someone tell a story you know very well and they stumble through it…tentatively, fearfully, dare I say lugubriously? Fear is the mind-killer, and so it is with traversing minefields expertly trod by absolute killers like John Waters and David Lynch. Best not to contribute if you don’t have something to contribute. It’s like finding yourself at a dinner party where you’ve read a few books, but everyone else is a Nobel Laureate. They say you never make a shot you don’t take, but there’s a rather large difference between playing to win and swinging for the fences. I feel like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity when some guy comes in looking for a copy of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” I mean, who could you possibly be buying this for? Oops, are they in a coma? Holland is timid where it needed to be bold. Honestly, it’s just a series of stumbles.

Start with Nicole Kidman, following up Babygirl, a film in which her bored, emotionally bound-up character needs to rub one out because her husband fails to satisfy her in bed, with…another film about the same thing. In Holland, she’s Nancy, a manic caricature of suburban ennui-turned-insanity but without the flair of Kathleen Turner’s take on this archetype in Serial Mom and lacking the palpable pathos of Joan Allen’s take on this archetype in Pleasantville. Nancy’s a high-school home-ec teacher (note her carefully not-Australian pronunciation of “Dutch Babies”) married to optometrist Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), who can’t satisfy her in bed, thus making Nancy interested in starting up an embroglio with co-worker Dave (Gael García Bernal) while she manufactures mysteries in bucolic Holland, MI to Nancy Drew her empty hours away. The first problem is that when Nicole Kidman used to play housewives, there generally needed to be an explanation for why she looks like Nicole Kidman, such as her being a robot, for instance, or a literal witch trying to pass. The problem she has now is that she’s modified herself in a way that has become a class signifier. At this point, she’s an uncanny version of herself. She can work in a fantasy setting–as a fierce Norse or Atlantean queen, let’s say–but has otherwise painted herself into a corner. If her character exists in the “real” world, she can only play older women of a certain high level of wealth and, more, saddled with the pressure of maintaining an appearance that might immediately become “dated” itself.

Call it Arnold Schwarzenegger Syndrome, in which he’s the perfect cyborg or barbarian from the Hyborian Age but doesn’t cut it as a dude named “Gordy Brewer” from Pennsylvania. What I’m saying is Nicole Kidman is not Nancy Vandergroot, and now we’re in trouble because if the first clue that Fred the eye doctor is having an affair or something is that he’s not interested in his wife sexually, well, maybe that’s because she doesn’t seem like a real person for even a second in Holland. Nancy Vandergroot looks like the AI product of a “Nicole Kidman as a Dutch housewife” prompt. (I forgot to count her fingers.) Maybe there’s a decent Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake inside Holland struggling to get out, or another The Stepford Wives (Kidman has, of course, starred in subpar remakes of both films). Holland is dead on arrival, is what I’m saying. Then you cast someone with the nervous, earnest energy of Bernal to play opposite Kidman’s whispery kewpie doll aspect and, again, this alleged sexual attraction doesn’t pass the most rudimentary sniff test. Dave (Dave?) is red hot for Nancy? Nancy is red hot for Dave? The only character perfectly cast is Fred–and he’s so perfectly cast, it’s immediately obvious he’s some kind of monster. In other words, the plot still isn’t interesting if you force yourself to take these relationships at face value.

Holland is essentially Bob Balaban’s Parents told from the mother’s perspective instead of the child’s. Nancy and Fred’s kid is Harry (Jude Hill), by the way, who spends the film practising a wooden clog dance for the town’s annual Dutch-fest as part of a running joke about how provincial this little burg is. Sufficed to say, Nancy (Drew! I get it now) discovers a horrible secret about her husband and sets out to prove it, leading to a couple of bloody set-pieces and a joke about the unsentimentality of Pomeranians I already enjoyed in Superman Returns. Her snooping also inspires an identical pair of Rear Window suspense sequences where Nancy breaks in somewhere but doesn’t answer her cell phone when Dave is trying to warn her she’s about to be discovered. Do you have an older person in your family who never has their phone on or never remembers to turn the ringer on when they do? Well, Holland relies on that feeling of irritation for multiple gags. It’s the sort of behavior that makes me root for the killer in slasher movies. 

The trouble with Holland isn’t necessarily that its protagonist is unbelievable and unlikeable or that it cycles through its limited roster of ideas multiple times. Nor is it the mashing together of genres; genres are always mashed together. No, the problem with Holland is that it’s so prosaic, the mind creates better films as you’re watching it. A MacGuffin is something the characters care about but the audience doesn’t, but what if they’re forced to care about it because, without a MacGuffin, there’s nothing else? Let’s get Nancy on that case. What I’m saying is that Holland is boring, familiar, and forced. It is the smooth, tubular product of a Play-Doh factory and holds within it the same drab load-it-up-and-shove-it-out cause-and-effect “satisfaction.” It’s like turning a crank that isn’t attached to anything. No one’s stopping you, but you’ve gotta have better things to do.