Holland
Nicole Kidman plays a Michigan housewife turned amateur sleuth in an occasionally fun but uneven comedy-thriller.
Jude Hill and Nicole Kidman
Image courtesy of Prime Video.
“Every day I get to wake up in the best place on Earth: Holland, Michigan. It’s just perfect. The people, the tulips, oh… and the windmill,” says Nancy Vandergroot, a Life Management teacher at Holland High. Holland, Michigan, is actually a real place, a community founded by Dutch Americans that prides itself on its heritage, attracting thousands every year to its Tulip Time Festival. There are clog dances, Dutch baby pancakes and, in pride of place, America’s oldest functioning windmill.
Here, Nicole Kidman plays Nancy Vandergroot, who is married to the optometrist Fred Vandergroot (Matthew Macfadyen) and is the doting mother of 13-year-old Harry (Jude Hill). She is the textbook mother and housewife, forever concocting exciting new dishes in her picture-perfect kitchen and keeping a tight rein on the language and manners at the dining room table. Grace is spoken in Dutch before every meal and Nancy takes her conjugal duties lying down, convincing herself that this is the ideal way to lead her life of domestic bliss. And downstairs in the basement Fred and Harry play with a magnificent train set, built into a spectacular recreation of the cosy town outside. It’s a boys’ own play zone, an area from which Nancy is discouraged from exploring…
We all harbour secrets that we dread being made public, and Nancy and Fred – and Nancy’s colleague at work, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), for that matter – have their reasons for manipulating the truth. Nancy dreams of a perfect sex life and Fred buys Pup-Peroni dog treats when nobody is looking. There is an air of the patronising in the way the citizens of Holland address each other, much like the citizenry of Fargo, in which a prefabricated affability fends off anything approaching the unseemly.
Of course, the director Mimi Cave is taking the mickey, as one might expect from the director of the grisly, inventive Fresh. Drawing on the deep-veined, off-centre and imperceptible menace of David Lynch, Cave photographs her mise en scène so that the model town in the Vandergroot’s basement is virtually indistinguishable from the model town of Holland without. The colour scheme is dialled up, along with the smiles of the populace, while beneath the surface there’s a whiff of Brian de Palma. The director is also careful not to reveal her hand too early, which keeps us on our toes. She has solicited excellent performances from Kidman, Macfadyen and García Bernal, but the tone never quite sits right with the material. It’s a little too artificial to draw one in entirely, like a comedy-mystery without the comedy. For the first half one is not sure where it’s going and when it gets there it is over too soon. But the ride is mischievous enough to keep us engaged and it’s always a pleasure to see what Macfadyen will do next, Honey.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Gael García Bernal, Jeff Pope, Rachel Sennott, Lennon Parham, Chris Witaske.
Dir Mimi Cave, Pro Kate Churchill, Peter Dealbert, Nicole Kidman and Per Saari, Screenplay, Ph Pawel Pogorzelski, Pro Des JC Molina, Ed Martin Pensa, Music Alex Somers, Costumes Susan Lyall, Sound Martyn Zub and Jeffrey A. Pitts, Dialect coaches Thom Jones and Charise Greene.
Amazon MGM Studios/Blossom Films/Big Indie Pictures/42-Amazon Media.
109 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 27 March 2025. Cert. 15.
