On the surface, Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) inhabits a picture-perfect world. Her charming house, her loving optometrist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), and her spirited son, Harry (Jude Hill), form an idyllic, enviable tableau. Nancy and Fred are pillars of their twee, suburban midwestern town of Holland, Michigan, with Nancy teaching at a local school. Everything is meticulously arranged, as curated and precise as Fred’s elaborate model train set in the garage. Yet, beneath this veneer of perfection, Mimi Cave’s sophomore feature film, Holland, hints at a disquieting undercurrent, a sense that the pieces are somehow out of order.
This is evident when Nancy panics when she can’t find one of her earrings. Disheveled at the thought of crime infiltrating her manicured life, Nancy berates the babysitter, played by Rachel Sennott, and kicks her out—to her son’s dismay. At first, Nancy’s uproar plays simply, like an uptight suburban mother, but her fixation indicates something else: She can’t take her life at face value.
And so, Nancy narrows in on another budding anxiety. Fred, who frequently leaves for optometry conventions, must be having an affair. Nancy is fueled by a galvanic desire to uncover some plot or conspiracy against her, tasking the lovestruck woodshop teacher Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal) to help her. The two conspicuous detectives stage an amateur investigation.
It gets messy. Even though what Nancy and Dave uncover is much messier than they anticipated—and painfully predictable—the mess in question is the film itself. Holland frays over and over again, tension building for mere seconds before predictability sets in again. It expects the audience to just understand why Holland might be uncanny, why Nancy pursued a quiet domestic life at first, and why we should care about extramarital espionage. Holland spoon-feeds us 90s nostalgia, half-heartedly paying homage to genuine suburban thrillers from 20-plus years ago. The only shock value is delivered in tepid dream sequences that, in retrospect, dilute the narrative after you realize they serve nearly no purpose but to explicitly scream, “Nancy is worried and probably right!”
To no one’s surprise, there is a sinister underbelly to the Vandergroots’ perfect life. But by the time the climax arrives, it feels like a tired retread of bygone thrillers, leaving audiences feeling that the film’s lens is severely out of focus. R, 108 min.
Prime
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