Film Review: “Holland” — Another Trip Through Suburban Malaise

By Matt Hanson

American darkness is now up front and personal. Holland‘s stale moves miss where we are now — disaster isn’t hidden, it is in clear view.

Nicole Kidman in a scene from Holland.

Nicole Kidman in a scene from Holland. Photo: Prime Video

As Holland begins, the new film by Mimi Cave available on Amazon Prime, Nicole Kidman’s Nancy purrs happily about how much she loves her life. Images of small-town life in the Upper Midwest go by, including visuals of nice looking young girls dressed like their Dutch ancestors grinning in the glow of flashbulbs. Reciting her mantra in a sing-songy voice, she talks about how wonderful everything is and how happy she is to live where she does. All seems to be too good to be true, of course, and that is the first thematic snag the film hits and doesn’t recover from.

In an arrangement that sounds like a math problem, Nancy is a teacher who is married to Fred Vandergroot, a perky ophthalmologist played by Matthew Macfadyen in the same dorky mode as his Tom Wambsgans in Succession. Family members say grace in Dutch before consuming the nightly meatloaf. Nancy has something uncomfortable in her past which isn’t really made clear, and her closest friend is fellow teacher Dave Delgado, played by Gael García Bernal. This character also has a murky backstory that makes him something of a loner. His being Hispanic in a sparkly white town is clearly a part of the problem, to the point that the movie slams down so hard on the Small Towns Are Racist button it breaks.

Fred is constantly leaving town on ill-defined business trips and that understandably arouses Nancy’s suspicions. He appears to be a doting father and sympathetic husband; yet for some reason a neurotic Nancy suspects that he’s living a double life. She’ll stop at nothing to figure out the truth. Enlisting Dave to help with the amateur sleuthing, she eventually finds herself in way over her head, becoming entangled with more than her willfully naïve vision of the world bargained for.

If this sounds like the setup for any number of movies in the suburban malaise genre, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. To be fair, the problem isn’t that the narrative works with antique premises. In some ways, tropes are meant to be recycled. One major problem is that we really don’t know enough about these people, other than their obvious slightly stagey normality. Why should we care about what Fred’s secret agenda might be? And, when we do finally find out, it’s less interesting than it promises to be because it’s less novel or imaginative than it could have been. Kidman and Macfadyen are fine actors, to be sure, but they can’t rise above such mediocre material.

Kidman is brilliant at playing desperate housewives of all varieties. Nancy is cut from the usual dingy housecoat; she’s just an inferior version. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with an actor sticking to a character archetype in their wheelhouse. We all know what to expect from certain performers, even (or maybe especially) the great ones. It’s all about being able to play compelling variations on a theme.

Matthew Macfadyen and Nicole Kidman in Holland. Photo: Prime Video

Kidman’s desperate housewives might be afflicted by similar existential dilemmas, but her brittle character in Eyes Wide Shut isn’t remotely the same as her perkily lethal weather girl in To Die For or the disturbed, elegiac widow in Birth, or even, for that matter, her Oscar-winning portrait in The Hours of the troubled Virginia Woolf. Nancy’s initial breakdown — when she is anxious about showing her face to the rest of the town during tulip season — provides a perceptive glimpse of how easily one can turn into a psychotic mess. She’s driven mad out of a desperate need to keep up appearances. And if that’s not what suburban living is all about, then I don’t know what is.

That said, Holland seems to want to have it all: combining the Coen brothers’ knowing snark about small town life with Hitchcockian suspense about what it’s like to unearth things about your family, friends, and neighbors that you’d rather not know. (Check out 1943’s terrific Shadow of a Doubt, with a screenplay partly penned by Thornton Wilder.) The fatal flaw is that screenwriter Andrew Sodroski doesn’t do anything new with the plot’s obvious predecessors, and thus misses all the notes — dramatic, comedic, romantic — that it’s desperately trying to hit.

Stories about the implicit creepiness and desperation of placid middle America are a long and venerable cinematic tradition, from Billy Wilder’s fame-crazed schmucks to Hitchcock’s seething freaks next door to the subterranean perversions of Blue Velvet to the casually gruesome fates that await most of the characters in Fargo. America’s inner weirdness is a perpetual attraction on our collective screens. It makes you wonder if this genre has remained so popular because it diagnoses the anxiety of a culture whose sketchy understanding of “normality” (a state heavily influenced by the movies) feeds fears of tipping from the ordinary into madness.

In America, everything is up for grabs. We lack the ingrained social boundaries that have guided older countries for centuries. The tantalizing promise — or better to say dream — is that we can become whatever we want to be, which inevitably, tragically, dissolves in the cold light of who we truly are. It turns out self-creation isn’t as easy to pull off as we have been told: the struggle to find a comfortable place in a perpetually fraying social fabric is becoming increasingly difficult. Thus the country’s fascination with the genre of true crime, a lineup of denial, secrets, and twisted motivations that map inevitable defeat. In the age of Trump, however, every facet of our nation’s life has become criminalized, and that has brought with it a concomitant effort by many to either cheerfully pretend it isn’t happening or that it’s all part of a bigger plan. Thus the challenge for a filmmaker is to move beyond the cliché that sin lies underneath a placid surface. American darkness is now up front and personal. Holland’s stale moves miss where we are now — disaster isn’t hidden, it is in clear view.


Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at The Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in The American Interest, The Baffler, The Guardian, The Millions, The New Yorker, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.

2 Comments

  1. Jojodoc on April 28, 2025 at 1:17 am

    This was a really awful movie, with scenes which did not link together. The Macfadyen character was stabbed, bleeding, fell into the water then miraculously came back to life. How did the Kidman character get the key for the hotel room? The movie was full of stuff like that. Terrible writing, terrible plots. What a waste of an evening.

    • Matt Hanson on May 1, 2025 at 12:34 pm

      It really was badly done in any number of ways. And FWIW I thought it wore its influences on its sleeve, which is not to damn it because it’s in the shadow of giants, but because it’s so clearly and shallowly trying way too hard to tread over already well-trod ground.

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