Though it can often feel like she is taken for granted, there are few performers working today who have demonstrated the vast range that Nicole Kidman has. She can be witheringly funny, devastatingly intense and is, most critically, always willing to throw herself into parts that can become tricky balancing acts between the two. In “Holland,” the latest twisty thriller from “Fresh” director Mimi Cave, this is put to the ultimate test.
Not only does Kidman have to flex all these muscles in playing a troubled woman who believes her husband is lying to her, but she must also weather what are some wild escalations that threaten to tear the entire film apart. That it doesn’t is a testament to her committed performance as, when paired with the always reliably engaging camerawork of “Fresh” cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, we get drawn into the rhythms of her world that is about to be utterly upended and leave her scrambling in the rubble.
And scramble the film does as well with an increasing sense that the script by Andrew Sodroski is trying to do far too much when it doesn’t need to. What this specifically entails is best left as vague as possible as to even tip off what “Holland” has in store for you would be to ruin what is still quite good fun. It does devolve as the story puts a hat on top of a hat on top of a hat in the twists it keeps insisting on throwing at you — but watching Kidman don both the actual large Dutch hats and the even more heavy narrative ones with poise is what makes the film mostly manage to stand tall all the same. It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.
The film, which premiered Sunday at SXSW, centers on the seemingly happy family of Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman), her sickeningly sweet husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and their snarky son Harry (Jude Hill) as they go about their days in the small town of Holland, Michigan. An eerily effective opening sequence where we see the repeated flashes of a camera taking photos of people creepily smiling sharply establishes that their wholesome community is doing all it can to cling to its picture-perfect image. However, in every frozen expression, the smiles look more pained and the eyes more terrified. If there is a thesis statement for the film, it is seen in these frightening fragments. We then follow Nancy as she teaches at the local high school, builds a fraught friendship with new teacher Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal) and starts to suspect her husband is keeping a secret from her. After all, Fred goes off to a suspiciously high number of conferences out of town for his work as an optometrist that always seem to come out of nowhere when they talk over dinner. Gasp, could it be that he’s having an affair?
This is all played with a humorous tone at first as Kidman’s Nancy is so dang nice that she doesn’t like swearing and is completely cracked up by watching “Mrs. Doubtfire” at home alone. But underneath this sweet disposition is a fear that her world may be falling apart as Fred was the one person who, she says, helped to bring her life under control. Kidman is terrific in these early scenes as she never turns Nancy into the easy butt of the joke, but a full person that feels completely real. Similarly, Macfadyen channels the same strengths that made his role in “Succession” so spectacular as he can communicate darkly comedic menace with just a subtle change in expression or shift in his tone. He is the believably boring optometrist who puts on a good show of loving his family and she the always nice teacher who is carrying a sadness that could crack her wide open. That Nancy makes the leap into trying to figure out what Fred is up to is played like an exciting sleuth movie that will begin to break open the monotony of her and Dave’s lives (as she gets him to begin helping her) more than either could ever possibly expect.
The longer this almost cute little investigation unfolds, the more the film starts to unravel in a way that it doesn’t fully have a handle on. Though there are a couple of wonderfully shot and constructed nightmare sequences where we see Nancy’s anxieties manifest themselves that cut deep, the ratcheting up of tension in her waking reality often loses this edge. A subplot that gets thrown in surrounding Dave trying to intervene in helping a student who he thinks may be being beaten at home feels half-baked and tacked on even before some more big late revelations make it downright nonsensical in retrospect. Indeed, the final swerve that the film throws at you nearly sinks the whole thing. That it doesn’t is because of the final key scenes that Kidman gets where we fully feel how broken Nancy has become. Still, much like the tiny town she is trapped in, “Holland” boxes itself in more than it should. And yet, Kidman breaks free of its limitations.
“Holland” had its world premiere at SXSW on March 9. It will be available to stream starting March 27 on Prime Video.
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