Adopted Nashvillian Nicole Kidman’s movie is a psychological thriller that feels like a fun mix of Hitchcock, Lynch and even a saucy dash of Tim Burton. It’s a family film cum existential noir set in a quaint small town in the days before 9-11, at the hopeful beginnings of this new century. Holland turns Americana idealism on its head — sometimes the tug-of-war between perception and reality here threatens to reach Blue Velvet levels. It’s a compelling theme in a contemporary culture that can often feel wanting for the firm grounding of agreed-upon facts, and it’s a quirky mystery movie that mostly has a clue.
Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman), her husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), and son Harry (Jude Hill) live a quiet life in the town of Holland, Michigan. Holland is famous for its tulip festival, its historic downtown festooned with flourishes of Dutch culture and tulip-centric design, and the giant wooden windmill that overlooks the town. Holland could be picture-perfect small town U.S.A., but in the hands of director Mimi Cave and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, Holland’s perfected pleasantness can be unsettling like a David Lynch film or even as uncanny as Tim Burton’s hyperreal visions of American suburbia. The town of Holland is literally the title character of this film, and the electric railroad model of the cozy burg that Fred and Harry are building in the garage recalls the model of the hedge maze in the lounge of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
Nancy is a part-time home economics teacher, and she confides in her friend, Dave the shop teacher (Gael Garcia Bernal), that she suspects that her husband Fred is having an affair. Fred is an optometrist who rescued Nancy from a nowhere rural backwater to their comfortable life in the upper-middle class. But his frequent business trips and some suspicious items in the garage have Nancy wondering if she still knows the man she married. An unlikely partnership forms between Nancy and Dave, and the pair begins to unravel a web of secrets that shifts the ground beneath Nancy’s feet.
Nancy Vandergroot goes full Nancy Drew: wearing a scarf and sunglasses to hide her identity; arranging secret sleuthing meet-ups with Dave, who’s terrified of the police; getting her kicks as a do-it-yourself gumshoe who’s as anxious to discover the truth as she is to un-stick the stultifying sameness of her days. I’m not a mark for Kidman, but I really like her here. She brings a fizzy mix of weird and funny to her portrayal of this unreliable heroine, and her line reading of the phrase “ipso facto” is right up there with the Emmy-bound Parker Posey’s “You wanna live in Taiwan?” from this year’s new season of The White Lotus.
All the acting is strong here, but the burgeoning romantic relationship between Nancy and Dave blossoms out of nowhere, adding a big blunder to an otherwise seamless film. It’s too bad, because there’s no need for there to be anything romantic between the pair, and making them plainly platonic would’ve added more to the buddy detective vibes in the film’s sleuth sequences. Otherwise writer Andrew Sodorski and this talented troupe of performers team well to give viewers an unreal world we can believe in.
Equal parts domestic drama, amateur procedural, suspense picture and horror film, Holland toys with the moral ambiguities of love and betrayal. It’s a movie about perfect surfaces concealing rotten interiors. It’s about secrets and lies, the ones we keep from our loved ones and the ones we tell ourselves.
Holland is streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.