HOLLAND - Mark Reviews Movies

Holland, Amazon Prime Video

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

Holland isn't much of a mystery, much of a thriller, much of a small-town satire, or much of a character study. Andrew Sodroski's screenplay offers up the broad strokes of all of those elements, leaving this narrative shallow to its minimal core.

The main idea, at least, suggests some generally diabolical entertainment, as the story follows Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman), the seemingly perfect wife and mother of an apparently perfect family in the eponymous Michigan locale. Some narration from our bland protagonist suggests that Nancy's life wasn't always like this, and sure enough, she keeps hinting to certain characters that she used to be some kind of mess or rebel or something more interesting than anything she shows in this story.

Anyway, she met, started dating, and ultimately married Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), the local optometrist. The two had a son, named Harry (Jude Hill), and now, the family lives ordinary lives, in which the kid heads off to school, the husband works mostly regular hours and attends multiple professional conferences every year, and the wife teaches home economics at the local high school, tends to the house, and cooks meals. Clearly bored with all of this, Nancy also likes to gossip with recent arrival and fellow teacher Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal).

The two like a good mystery, and soon enough, Nancy has a couple to solve. The first is a missing earring (She blames that on a random character played by Rachel Sennott), and the second arrives when Nancy starts to wonder why her husband seems to have more conferences than usual to attend.

Plot is the game here, and there's a lot of it, mostly of the circular and evasive variety, in this story. Director Mimi Cave never quite decides upon a tone here, simply letting Nancy's investigation into what her husband might be up to with his regular out-of-town excursions play out with a slightly off-kilter edge. In theory, this is all a lark for Nancy, who finds assorted clues—such as empty film boxes, with no sign of any developed photographs, and a mysterious package—that lead her to believe that he has a secret. From her attitude, this seems to be a game for Nancy, who either doesn't believe that boring old Fred could really be doing anything untoward or doesn't really care if he is.

There's a certain degree of innocence, then, to the early parts of the mystery, as if Nancy is simply living out some fantasy of being a detective and spending time with Dave, a kindred spirit of sorts in all things of rumor and real-life puzzles. Also in theory, the idea is that, as the pair's hunt for more evidence about Fred's activities progresses, things become more serious—not only in what they uncover, but also in how the bond between Nancy and Dave develops.

Cave just plays everything straight, and Kidman's performance doesn't quite have a grip on who Nancy is outside of the plot (Surely, the screenplay has a lot to do with that uncertainty). As a result, the narrative never feels as if it's escalating along with the potential severity of what's uncovered and what does develop between our amateur sleuths.

Meanwhile, the air of the movie is generally odd, from the occasional upper-Midwest accents that pop up in certain side players to a dream sequence in which Nancy imagines the town shrinking and flooding around her. There's no sense of specificity to the characters (A lot of details, such as Nancy's elusive past, are only mentioned in passing), the location (apart from its Dutch trappings, like an annual tulip festival), or why, even, this plot unfolds the way it does, except as a matter of necessity.

Sodroski's script does have one intriguingly sinister angle to it, although to hint at it any more would be to give away the one slight surprise of this tale. It's not much of a shock, of course, given that the central mystery only has three or four ways that it might go, but in an instant, the stakes are raised to a wicked degree. It's a fine starting point for a thriller or to provide some thematic bite, but the movie rushes the aftermath of both the revelation and its consequences.

The whole mess leaves us baffled by why Nancy reacts the way she does, since the character is such a cypher and so contradictory within the screenplay (She clearly and desperately wants something new, different, and exciting but keeps falling back on safe routine, even when the desired alternative is right in front of her). The purpose and point of Holland become more of a puzzle than anything in its story.

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