Nicole Kidman is, in general, providing a public service with her seemingly inexhaustible energy. She’s been working consistently with female directors – 19 in the last eight years – while also attempting to rescue the tight domestic thrillers of yore and consistently probing the gap between women’s placid public facades and private turmoil. The quality of Kidman’s performances – and she is almost always delivering something a little weird, a little off and very magnetic – does not indicate the quality of the project, which can range from the provocative (if underwhelming) Babygirl to her personal beach-read cinematic universe of mediocre TV roles.
Holland, Kidman’s latest film as a star and producer (under her Blossom Films banner), finds Kidman in a familiar groove: a suburban housewife with secrets and suspicions, beset by paranoia and straining to keep up appearances. Like many a Kidman character before her, Nancy Vandergroot projects perfection – china-doll smile, coiffed hair, nuclear family dinners – and nurses big feelings about the small stakes of her fishbowl environ. The trailer, released ahead of the SXSW film festival by distributor Amazon Prime Video, promises a Kidman performance in the lane of The Stepford Wives – eerie, brittle and unnerving, with the added weirdness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic lakeside town locally famous for its annual tulip festival. In practice, it squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing.
A thriller more in intention than execution, Holland certainly looks stylish, owing to sharp direction by Mimi Cave, whose 2022 debut feature Fresh deftly weaved the travails of modern dating into sly and gnarly horror. Working this time with a script from Andrew Sodroski – one that bounced around Hollywood for nearly a decade, seemingly for good reason – Cave, a longtime director of music videos, once again demonstrates a keen eye for the portent in the mundane, but struggles to wring suspense out of a story that flounders about for a full 80 minutes before quickly accelerating and then stalling out.
Those first 80 minutes center Nancy’s suspicion that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist who is either at work or chipping away at an elaborate model train set with their son, Harry (Jude Hill), is having an affair, based on seemingly nothing but vibes and possible manic paranoia. In the effort to prove her husband is unfaithful, Nancy, a home economics teacher at the local high school, becomes entangled with her colleague Dave (an underused Gael García Bernal), a Mexican immigrant who experiences racism when it is necessary to the plot. The deeper Nancy and Dave go into their amateur investigation – and, as more than half of a movie that feels longer than its 108 minutes, it’s a remarkably shallow deep – the more Nancy’s manicured world crumbles around her, most provocatively in a handful of nightmare sequences where Cave flexes her capabilities for the surreal.
Though the script was initially set in the present, Cave decided to set the film in the year 2000, if for no other reason than some gentle nostalgia pull and the convenient location of Nancy’s sleuthing somewhere between the analog (breaking into his office, old receipts) and the nascent digital (texting on Nokia phones, Ask Jeeves). Sodroski chose to set the story in Holland, seemingly because people smiling in wooden clogs and pointy hats makes for a particularly creepy facade of normalcy. Cave, who grew up outside Chicago, makes better work of standard midwestern kitsch – Little Caesars pizza and ceramic figurines in glass containers, floral wallpapers and ketchup designs on meatloaf – than the town traditions, filmed as if straining for unease.
Still, there’s a discernible gap between the quality of the visuals, the chilling atmosphere of destabilizing suspicion that Cave conjures, and the actual material, which is as flimsy as one of Nancy’s Dutch hats. Kidman is predictably effective in “honest to gosh” housewife mode, diving into Nancy’s fixations with typical full commitment. But both women are underserved by this story that goes fully off the rails in the second half. No spoilers, but suffice to say some twists and heel-turns feel unearned to the point of audience annoyance, all blanketed with a vague question of what’s real and what’s not that’s more of a cop-out than a complication.
Which is a shame – Holland has all the parts of a classic domestic thriller, the type that made Kidman’s career and which movie fans still miss. In the final sum of the Kidman oeuvre, I suspect this will be but a footnote. If nothing else, though, it’s more evidence of a larger, worthwhile project.
Holland is screening at the SXSW film festival and will be available on Amazon Prime on 27 March
