Holland: Film Review
I was really impressed by Mimi Cave‘s 2022 feature directorial debut Fresh so I was keen to check out her next thriller, Holland, starring one of my faves, Nicole Kidman.
Set in the quaint idyllic town of Holland, Michigan, this thriller stars Kidman as teacher and homemaker Nancy Vandergroot. Her picture-perfect life unravels when she begins to suspect her optometrist husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) of having an affair. She decides to take matters into her own hands and becomes an amateur detective alongside her friend and colleague, Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal).
Holland is a slow-burning and unpredictable thriller with many twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end. Cave does a brilliant job of building the tension, suspicion and paranoia, and placing us in Nancy’s disturbed mindset through nightmare sequences and creepy dreamscapes. You can’t tell if her concerns are legitimate or if she’s making it up to create some excitement in her stagnant life.
I loved the old-fashioned and unusual setting, and the concept had plenty of potential, but the execution lacked something. It doesn’t quite hit the beats or achieve the tone it’s supposed to. Despite this, I still enjoyed watching Nancy and Dave investigate Fred and come up with sleuthing schemes. She puts the clues together and jumps to major conclusions, and the way she discovers some of her breakthroughs is a bit too easy and convenient.
Kidman always delivers the goods, and she does brilliantly as the bored and paranoid wife with a very peculiar accent. Macfadyen’s Fred presents as a polite and well-spoken person, but this is all a facade, and I couldn’t wait to find out what his secret was. As we’ve seen from Succession, Macfadyen is very good at being nice on the surface and deceitful underneath. With Bernal, I didn’t have any issues with his performance, but his kind character Dave deserved better.
I loved the style and a lot of the imagery in Holland and I was intrigued by the mystery, but it didn’t quite come together.
On Prime Video from Thursday 27th March
Rating: 3 out of 5.
