Holland (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – A woman’s picture-perfect life in quaint Holland, Michigan crumbles, when she and a friend uncover a twisted secret in their midst.

My Take – Nicole Kidman has to probably be one of the busiest actors working right now. Swiftly switching between film and TV roles, while finding enough time in between to endorse cinema chains, beauty products and even appear in fashion magazines.

But while the quality of her performances remains undoubtedly magnetic every time, the quality of her projects end up ranging from underwhelming to mostly easy going fun.

Her latest feature, a Prime Video release, as star and producer, finds Kidman in a familiar groove playing a suburban housewife who finds herself beset by paranoia, secrets and suspicions, and teased a surreal, psychedelic ride through mystery and bizarre, with the added weirdness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic lakeside town locally famous for its annual tulip festival.

Unfortunately, the final product is more of a weirdly paced lackluster mystery thriller that even the central performance cannot save. A thriller more in set-up than execution, the film certainly looks stylish owing to sharp direction by Mimi Cave, whose debut feature Fresh (2022) deftly weaved the travails of modern dating into a deliciously gnarly horror.

But, working this time with a script from Andrew Sodroski, she struggles to squeeze suspense and thrills out of a story that mostly flounders and then simply stalls out.

Which is a shame, considering it has all the parts of a classic domestic thriller, the type that comprise of Kidman’s career, and admirably strives for something original, only if it didn’t have the unavoidable feeling that everything could have been better and with less familiarity.

Set in the year 2000, the story follows Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman), a suburban mother and high school home economics teacher, who lives a picture-perfect life with her loving optometrist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), and her spirited teen son, Harry (Jude Hill) in the mid-western town of Holland, Michigan. But while her home life is mostly charming with an occasional blip here and there, her fixation indicates something else: she can’t take everything at face value.

Especially, when she gets suspicious about Fred as he announces about going on yet another business trip. Particularly, considering his profession. Then she finds a crumpled-up ticket from Madison, Wisconsin, when he was supposed to be on the other side of Michigan.

Suspecting that Fred is having an affair, Nancy decides to investigate with awkward help from her love-struck wood-shop colleague from school, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), a Mexican immigrant who is dealing with his own racism troubles. But as the two conspicuous detectives get deeper into the amateur investigation, the more Nancy’s manicured world begins crumbles around.

Sure, the 108 minute long film starts off quirky and interesting as a part suburban melodrama, part suspenseful mystery with a sordid affair thrown in for flavor. But as quickly as it establishes the sense of a fake veneer, it just as quickly falls apart.

Working from a screenplay by Andrew Sodroski, here, director Cave constructs striking visuals but they don’t amount to much because there’s very little that’s compelling in the treatment. She even spoon-feeds us 90s nostalgia like Nokia phones, paying homage to genuine suburban thrillers from 20-plus years ago, but her film simply unravels over and over again, where tension builds for mere seconds before predictability setting in again.

It expects us to use our imagination to answer why this town is so uncanny, why Nancy pursued a quiet domestic life at first, and why we should care about this extramarital espionage.

Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, an Ari Aster regular, captures the town with storybook-like vibrancy, but the unconventional location functions as little more than kitschy window-dressing, one that could be swapped out with any other small-minded mid-western town.

Indeed, the story has a (un) surprising twist that, is revealed in the latter half of the second act but once that’s done there’s nowhere left to go. The attempt at divulging into suburban paranoia and isolation becomes pointless, leaving the narrative to plod along, weighed down by abandoned story-lines.

The only sense of thrill come in the form of the freaky dream sequences that, in retrospect, dilute the narrative after you realize they serve nearly no purpose.

Performance wise, Nicole Kidman is in cruise control, delivering a performance that’s as reliably transfixing as she always is, but not quite peak. She is undoubtedly the heart of the film, throwing herself completely into the role, funky accent and all.

Matthew Macfadyen and Gael García Bernal, are both competent as always, though they end up being underused in a narrative that is constructed without much guile and is fundamentally confused about its purpose. On the whole, ‘Holland‘ is an inept mystery thriller that squanders the talents of its cast and is too befuddled in its efforts.