In a winding thriller, Nicole Kidman leads the cast as the meticulous Nancy Vandergroot in director Mimi Cave’s sophomore film, “Holland,” written by Andrew Sodroski. Nancy bakes, knits, takes care of her home, and is even a teacher. She lives a picture-perfect life with her deacon husband Fred and young son Harry (Jude Hill) in Holland, Michigan. Then, the idyllic life twists. 
Nancy becomes suspicious of her husband when where he says he’s going and where he actually goes on business trips begin to misalign. Curious and dedicated to uncovering whatever affair Fred is hiding, Nancy asks her friend and fellow teacher, David (Gael Garcia Bernal), to help her uncover the truth. 
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“Holland” accelerates a comfortable marriage by letting Nancy run away from the boredom that the comfort brings. Through a series of assumptions, Nancy builds importance to her life, getting swept up in the thrill of the pursuit. The ultimate takeaway is that Kidman’s Nancy is unhappy and begins to make it everyone else’s problem. When divorce is too hard, why not just stalk your husband for an excuse to ruin his life and move on?
Visually, “Holland”  is gorgeous, with fantastical set design taking hold in nightmares and idyllic pastels, creating a town centered around a windmill. Cave and Sodroski understand how to use the miniature town in Nancy’s garage as fertile ground for visually exploring how stuck Nancy feels and how much both she and her husband seek to control. While this is thanks to the film’s overall production design, Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography captures the stark shifts from dreamlike excitement, nightmarish anxieties, and the reality that hives in the space in between. This is a film that thrives on its location and characters’ contradictions, but to drive that home, the visual storytelling also has to fall into place.
When it comes down to it, Mimi Cave and Andrew Sodorski use genre expectations to weave in and out of Nancy’s unraveling sense of self and that part works. She’s comfortable in her life, but as she becomes more and more engrossed in the idea of solving some larger mystery, first with the case of a missing earring, escalating to solving the real reason for her husband’s frequent business trips, it becomes clear that she isn’t okay. What doesn’t work is how slowly the film’s second act is, which takes some of the steam out of the film’s finale. Add in how frustrated I became with Nancy, and well, I’m mixed.
Nancy is somehow as irredeemable a character as her husband. In one moment, that feels like Mimi Cave’s point, but in the next, that critique of white womanhood seems to turn into coincidence instead of international. The film’s lack of intentionality makes its story move at a snail’s pace despite Cave’s clever and intelligent directorial choices with how she injects comedy and showcases Nancy’s hypocrisy. 
For all of my frustration with the thriller’s meandering, Kidman and Garcia Bernal have dynamic chemistry that keeps you invested. Individually, they’re both fantastic, but together, they’re a duo you can’t take your eyes off of. As Nancy, Kidman is exquisitely neurotic, her breathy voice covers her anxieties and loneliness. 
Nancy’s real problem is that she can’t take responsibility for anything she wants. Her nightmares leave her weighed down by her life and trapped in her husband’s miniature town. But as she wavers on whether or not to just stay in comfort or leave, it’s clear how spineless she is until circumstances force her to make a decision. 
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Kidman and Garcia Bernal’s noir-inspired attempt to solve the mystery that Nancy has created in her head is “Holland” at its best. The comedy that transpires, the hypocrisies that bubble up, and the way they bumble through their investigation will have you smiling throughout. That said, this is just one element of the movie.
“Holland”  is a mystery, a family drama, a crime story, a critique on white womanhood and how you can become so self-absorbed with your own life that you can’t see the harmful ripples you cause to feel better. All of these elements work when siloed off, and Holland’s different genre inspirations craft a thriller that keeps building. Still, when the different elements of the film come together, they don’t do so seamlessly. 
The oddest choice that Cave and Sodroski make is to add racism into the film. In one moment, Gael Garcia Bernal’s David Delgado is trying to help a student, and the next, the student and his father are throwing things at his house and screaming “beaner” at him as they tell him to go back to Mexico. And then it’s never noted again. The whiteness of Holland, Michigan, is central to how it’s presented, sure, especially in the spaces where Nancy finds comfort. But outside of one racist incident, this thread is dropped.
Still, David somehow moves from being the only brown man in the room and the target of overt aggression to a man who can easily blend into the background and follow Nancy’s husband completely unnoticed. When the only way you can add depth to a character played by one of the most renowned international Mexican actors is by adding in a racism subplot only to abandon it, well, there’s something foundationally wrong with the story’s starting point. Even when the audience is given hints at previous run-ins with law enforcement, we don’t learn anything about David’s past—Nancy’s personal miniature.
In his role, Gael Garcia Bernal is a man easily moved because of how close he is to Nancy. He just wants to help, even when she makes it increasingly difficult to do so. He’s endearing and easy to connect with. While his character may be stunted in general, his performance sells it the most that he can. It’s easy to fall in love with him, which makes how much Nancy begins to ruin his life all the more frustrating.
“Holland” is stronger in parts and weaker as a whole. There is enough to hold onto, but I couldn’t help but think it could have been something greater. “Holland” is full of good ideas, good acting, and stylish design. But with a meandering narrative and a deeply exploitative main character that oscillates between being framed as sympathetic and unlikeable, is too much to overcome. [C+]
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