Holland, Mi., is one of those high-concept American towns where nothing feels real. Modeled after someone’s fantasy of an 18th-century Dutch village, it has windmills and tulip fields and ersatz canal houses. To Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman), it seems quaint, but to our eyes, it’s pure kitsch — which is a mode Kidman does well, channeling the tone of “To Die For” and “The Stepford Wives” in Mimi Cave’s mysterious thriller.
Like those movies, “Holland” embeds us largely in its protagonist’s point of view, which isn’t an entirely credible place to spend two hours, but a fun one for those who like teetering in that is-she-crazy-or-is-she-the-only-sane-person-here zone. Since it’s Cave behind the camera, your imagination will likely leap to explanations a lot more interesting than where Andrew Sodroski’s Black Listed script winds up. (Fun fact: At one point, “Holland” was intended to be Errol Morris’ fiction debut, with Naomi Watts in the lead.)
The stylish but weirdly conventional film marks Cave’s follow-up to “Fresh,” a ghoulish relationship satire — and a pioneering example of the emerging gaslighting genre — in which a charming dork (Sebastian Stan) subjects his dates to a rare form of torture (make that medium rare). But it was written before #MeToo made standing up to The Man such a creative sport, and ultimately feels like a throwback to ’90s-era sleeping-with-the-enemy movies.
So what kind of mind games might Nancy’s husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) be up to? A conscientious (if slightly patronizing) partner and respected community optometrist, the man spends most of his free time tinkering with his model railroad, a hobby he enthusiastically shares with their adolescent son Harry (Jude Hill, the child star of Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” presented here like an escapee from Village of the Damned). In one scene, she checks in on the two of them in Fred’s private train room, where she spies her husband clipping the limbs off a plastic 1:87-scale woman. That hardly seems normal, but nothing is in Nancy’s world.
It’s interesting to see “Holland,” which premiered at the SXSW film festival in advance of its March 27 Prime release, less than two months after the death of David Lynch, since he’s clearly a strong influence on Cave’s hallucinatory aesthetic. As Nancy’s voiceover describes her life in Holland as “the best place on earth,” the camera sweeps along rows of Kodachrome-intense tulips, before abruptly cutting to the clutter of her life — an obvious nod to Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” about the nightmare festering behind the American Dream.
Nancy suspects something’s not quite right with her marriage, but she can’t put her finger on what’s amiss. Truth be told, she’s developed extramarital feelings for Dave (Gael García Bernal), the sympathetic shop teacher at the high school where she works, which means this could all be an elaborate case of projection: Nancy wants to cheat, so she manufactures a scenario where Fred’s being unfaithful to justify her own indiscretions. But if it were that simple, she probably wouldn’t go quite so far to investigate him.
Sodroski’s screenplay references rocky moments in the couple’s past, as well as a time when Nancy’s life was far less idyllic than the Pleasantville existence that’s finally starting to bore her. “When you grow up on the outside of everything, and a guy offers you a way in, of course you’re going to take it,” Nancy tells Dave, a Mexican for whom moving to Holland didn’t necessarily improve the way others treat him. (A subplot involving a drunken and likely abusive ex-bus driver illustrates the bigotry still directed his way.)
We can assume that as a teacher, Nancy must have plenty of colleagues and friends she can confide in, but given the upstanding front the Vandergroots project to this churchy community, she trusts only Dave, enlisting him in her investigation. As the sort of spouse who cooks and cleans like a 1950s housewife, Nancy knows their home inside-out. “Ipso facto,” she concludes, whatever evidence might exist of Fred’s extramarital activities must be hidden away in his office safe.
Cave clearly enjoys orchestrating a pair of “Rear Window”-style suspense sequences, in which Nancy snoops first at Fred’s workplace and later into whatever her husband’s really doing on those frequent out-of-town optometry conferences he’s always attending. The helmer takes even greater pleasure imagining Nancy’s dreams, where Cave is free to get radically expressionistic while also planting red herrings. It’s during those visions that Cave’s crew starts to blur the line between Nancy’s life and the scale-model city to which Fred dedicates so much attention.
Where everything was meant to look idealized at first, as Nancy’s paranoia spirals, production designer JC Molina and “Midsommar” DP Pawel Pogorzelski lean into the ambiguity. Pogorzelski in particular subliminally incorporates Nancy’s subjectivity into his camerawork, although there are more self-conscious instances too, like the ingenious high-angle shot, enhanced by tilt-shift trickery, that makes Nancy and Harry look as if they’re tiny model-train figures running toward their front door.
Through it all, Macfadyen seems suspiciously good-natured, which merely encourages us to guess what he might be hiding. The “Succession” star brings a disconcerting Kevin Spacey-like energy to his performance, which reinforces the connection some might detect between “Holland” and 1999’s “American Beauty” — another movie about the toxic black mold that thrives just beneath the veneer of suburban perfection. After several years of looking more natural, Kidman also has a slightly artificial appearance (there’s something off with her tulips), which Cave uses to the film’s advantage.
“Holland” blossoms in the space where all-American domestic fantasy ends and nightmares begin, but never quite delivers on its premise, if only because the resolution feels so familiar. And yet, when considered through the lens of Kidman’s risk-taking career, it represents another fascinating choice for a star who’s racked up some of the edgiest credits of the past quarter-century. It’s a shame then that “Holland” doesn’t go father in either the freak-out or high-camp directions.
Just one or two truly outrageous moments can make the difference between forgettability and hall-of-fame effed-up-ness, and “Holland” takes the most unexpected turn of all: Once the big family secret’s out in the open, it winds up feeling perfectly ordinary.
