Director Mimi Cave’s follow-up to her Sundance hit Fresh is dull, with a lacklustre thriller plot revealed too late in the game.
PLOT: A teacher (Nicole Kidman) in Holland, Michigan finds her picture-perfect life shattered when she discovers that her seemingly mild-mannered optometrist husband (Matthew Macfadyen) has a secret.
REVIEW: Holland has to rank as my biggest disappointment of the movies I’ve seen this year at SXSW. I was a huge fan of director Mimi Cave’s last film, Fresh, which was a delicious (pun-intended) cannibalism thriller that, sadly, had the misfortune of coming out right in the middle of the pandemic, meaning it had a rather unceremonious release on Hulu. I was disappointed to learn that Amazon/ MGM would also be releasing her follow-up, Holland, on streaming rather than in theatres. Having seen the finished film, I can see why, with it the kind of embarrassing dud that, hopefully, gets buried so all involved can move on to better things.
I’m not sure what exactly went wrong with Holland, with the script by Andrew Sodorski having topped The Blacklist back in 2013, but something seems to have gone wrong in its journey to the big screen. It adopts a blackly comic, Coen Bros-style vibe that it’s too ham-fisted to crack, with it deadly dull for the first two-thirds of the punishing running time. Some relief is felt when a darker, very telegraphed twist finally rears its head, but by then, it’s hard to invest much in this goofy, clunky comic thriller.
Nicole Kidman plays a familiar role, with her Nancy, the same kind of picture-perfect small-town wife she played on Big Little Lies. She and her husband are pillars of their close-knit, dutch-influenced community, but he’s away on business constantly, leading her to believe she’s having an affair. She somehow convinces a fellow teacher she has the hots for, played by Gael García Bernal, to help her shadow him, hoping to prove he’s cheating. Obviously, they find out the secret is much darker but it takes forever for that reveal to finally happen.
Holland is one of those movies where everyone comes off like a cartoon. Kidman’s Nancy is portrayed as a kind of screwball-style heroine for the first chunk of the movie, with her suddenly changing into cold and calculating before finally ending up as a more traditional lead – all of which is confusing and makes her impossible to invest in. Kidman seems to be going for the same kind of heightened vibe she used (brilliantly) in To Die For, but she isn’t served well by the leaden pacing or confused narrative.
Gael García Bernal’s character makes even less sense, with him a new teacher in town who seems way too smart to get pulled into Nancy’s plot, even if he is supposed to be in love with her. The movie seems to be trying to make some kind of commentary on how he’s being “othered” in the whitebread town, with him even the victim of a racist attack at one point that feels lifted from another movie and ultimately goes nowhere. For his part, Macfadyen proves to be one note as the overly gregarious town optometrist with a secret.
Maybe the best way to describe Holland is as a Fargo clone, but done badly. It’s a serious misfire for Mimi Cave, who tries to give the film some visual flair but is unable to hit the darkly comic vibe the film aspires to. It’s the kind of movie that may seem clever on the page, but as a movie, it’s a serious chore to sit through.
