Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. The latter’s oppressive stillness and artifice, atop its simulacrum of a weathered dust bowl settlement, might proffer comparisons with Holland’s all-too-cheerful miniatures of puritanical suburbia. Nicole Kidman, too, stars in both films. But the similarities end there immediately, for Cave’s feature not only entraps its furnishings in maximalist and almost parodic detail, but also sets about inducing the viewer into a narcotic trance. Woozy, oneiric, and ultimately incoherent, the film’s boxed-in environs attempt to mimic the fragile psychology of its childlike protagonist, and — given a tighter and meatier screenplay — might have succeeded. Instead, paranoia quickly makes way for crude panic, as Cave layers each twist and holds each bated breath with the cheap expectation of primetime thrillers. Nothing, in the end, means all that much.
Fresh off her 2022 Sundance debut, Fresh, in which dating red flags were given a crimson and cannibalistic twist, Cave returns with a stale adaptation of Andrew Sodroski’s long-shuttered script, imbuing its pallid proceedings with saturated if insubstantial hue. This time, the spotlight is trained on what appears to be middle class ennui, as refracted through the impassioned eyes of one white woman. Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman), a home economics teacher comfortably nested in the real-life city of Holland, Michigan, feels something is amiss. First, a lone earring of hers goes missing, for which she blames and fires the babysitter. Then, she suspects her ophthalmologist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), of having an affair. With thirteen-year-old Harry (Jude Hill) in the crosshairs of any potentially explosive conflict between husband and wife, Nancy has no real outlet, except in her Mexican colleague Dave (Gael García Bernal), whom she tasks with snooping on Fred after her own efforts prove futile.
The hypothetical contractual clause present in most star-studded psychological mysteries mandates, apparently, that some big reveal must come to fruition, and so Holland, not unlike Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, carefully centers her lead’s crumbling sense of self around this eventual climax. Where Don’t Worry Darling instantiated a clean and genuinely destabilizing rupture from manufactured normalcy, however, Cave’s plodding screenplay takes turns at once bizarre and curiously banal. There’s a jarring anachronism in its noughties-set, fifties-styled setup (the analog-digital border projected backward onto gendered family dynamics), which, to the film’s credit, serves to alienate Nancy’s neurotic imaginations from our own. But to what end? It’s not clear what the real target of her skepticism is: cheating husbands are tropes a dime a dozen, and the eponymous city’s eccentricities barely warrant discussion, as they’re mostly cosmetic and far-removed from her immediate preoccupations.
Holland, nonetheless, contains the germ of what might be a tantalizing unravelling of Nancy’s fraying solipsism; an unravelling only alluded to, it seems, in a couple of disconcerting but dead-end dream sequences. (A belated final twist, tacitly inserted in the film’s closing voiceover, suggests this potential.) In practice, its execution foregrounds stylistic verve over all things, major plot points and much-needed motives included. What brought the Vandergroots to their quaint Dutch diorama, and what feeds their respective urges, are shuttered and stereotyped respectively; the realism of Nancy’s self-destructive mania, too, is mostly hidden behind Kidman’s assured but calculated acting. Ultimately, the time is out of joint in Holland’s sloppily realized clockwork, and its thematic grievances only given redress post hoc.
DIRECTOR: Mimi Cave; CAST: Nicole Kidman, Gael Garcia Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Rachel Sennott; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; STREAMING: March 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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