Nicole Kidman is, typically, offering a public service along with her seemingly inexhaustible vitality. She’s been working constantly with feminine administrators – 19 within the final eight years – whereas additionally trying to rescue the tight home thrillers of yore and constantly probing the hole between girls’s placid public facades and personal turmoil. The standard of Kidman’s performances – and he or she is sort of at all times delivering one thing just a little bizarre, just a little off and really magnetic – doesn’t point out the standard of the venture, which might vary from the provocative (if underwhelming) Babygirl to her private beach-read cinematic universe of mediocre TV roles.
Holland, Kidman’s newest movie as a star and producer (beneath her Blossom Movies banner), finds Kidman in a well-recognized groove: a suburban housewife with secrets and techniques and suspicions, beset by paranoia and straining to maintain up appearances. Like many a Kidman character earlier than her, Nancy Vandergroot initiatives perfection – china-doll smile, coiffed hair, nuclear household dinners – and nurses large emotions concerning the small stakes of her fishbowl environ. The trailer, launched forward of the SXSW movie pageant by distributor Amazon Prime Video, guarantees a Kidman efficiency within the lane of The Stepford Wives – eerie, brittle and unnerving, with the added weirdness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic lakeside city regionally well-known for its annual tulip pageant. In observe, it squanders the skills of its star, particularly for this explicit model of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that provides as much as nothing.
A thriller extra in intention than execution, Holland definitely seems to be trendy, owing to sharp course by Mimi Cave, whose 2022 debut function Contemporary deftly weaved the travails of recent courting into sly and gnarly horror. Working this time with a script from Andrew Sodroski – one which bounced round Hollywood for practically a decade, seemingly for good purpose – Cave, a longtime director of music movies, as soon as once more demonstrates a eager eye for the portent within the mundane, however struggles to wring suspense out of a narrative that flounders about for a full 80 minutes earlier than shortly accelerating after which stalling out.
These first 80 minutes middle Nancy’s suspicion that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist who’s both at work or chipping away at an elaborate mannequin prepare set with their son, Harry (Jude Hill), is having an affair, based mostly on seemingly nothing however vibes and attainable manic paranoia. Within the effort to show her husband is untrue, Nancy, a house economics instructor on the native highschool, turns into entangled along with her colleague Dave (an underused Gael García Bernal), a Mexican immigrant who experiences racism when it’s essential to the plot. The deeper Nancy and Dave go into their newbie investigation – and, as greater than half of a film that feels longer than its 108 minutes, it’s a remarkably shallow deep – the extra Nancy’s manicured world crumbles round her, most provocatively in a handful of nightmare sequences the place Cave flexes her capabilities for the surreal.
Although the script was initially set within the current, Cave determined to set the movie within the 12 months 2000, if for no different purpose than some mild nostalgia pull and the handy location of Nancy’s sleuthing someplace between the analog (breaking into his workplace, previous receipts) and the nascent digital (texting on Nokia telephones, Ask Jeeves). Sodroski selected to set the story in Holland, seemingly as a result of folks smiling in picket clogs and pointy hats makes for a very creepy facade of normalcy. Cave, who grew up exterior Chicago, makes higher work of normal midwestern kitsch – Little Caesars pizza and ceramic collectible figurines in glass containers, floral wallpapers and ketchup designs on meatloaf – than the city traditions, filmed as if straining for unease.
Nonetheless, there’s a discernible hole between the standard of the visuals, the chilling ambiance of destabilizing suspicion that Cave conjures, and the precise materials, which is as flimsy as one among Nancy’s Dutch hats. Kidman is predictably efficient in “sincere to gosh” housewife mode, diving into Nancy’s fixations with typical full dedication. However each girls are underserved by this story that goes totally off the rails within the second half. No spoilers, however suffice to say some twists and heel-turns really feel unearned to the purpose of viewers annoyance, all blanketed with a imprecise query of what’s actual and what’s not that’s extra of a cop-out than a complication.
Which is a disgrace – Holland has all of the elements of a traditional home thriller, the sort that made Kidman’s profession and which film followers nonetheless miss. Within the ultimate sum of the Kidman oeuvre, I believe this will probably be however a footnote. If nothing else, although, it’s extra proof of a bigger, worthwhile venture.
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