Holland Review: Suburban Secrets Boil Over in Last Act
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Nancy, a school teacher at an American town called Holland, starts suspecting her ‘perfect’ husband of having an affair when she finds polaroid photos in his shelves. They don’t own a polaroid camera. Her private investigation into her husband’s whereabouts with a fellow teacher leads to unravelling of secrets nobody is prepared for.
Created by Mimi Cave (director) and Andrew Sodroski (writer), the 2025 movie ‘Holland’ stars Nicole Kidman as protagonist Nancy, while Matthew MacFadyen plays her Optometrist husband Fred Vandergroot. Gael Garcia Bernal portrays Dave Delgado, Nancy’s colleague, the innocent (sort of) bystander who becomes ‘collateral damage’ in the murky affairs of the Vendergroot family.
There’s something off about everything in “Holland” right from the start – from its clearly cosmetic setting of a small, wannabe Dutch town in America, to its ‘happy’ inhabitants, whose biggest life event is attending the Tulip Festival. It’s hard not to think of Kidman’s movie Stepford Wives, which was all about picture-perfect families living in a dreamy suburb with twisted secrets.
Although, in Holland, the eventual story twist is more personal, even if staggeringly shocking. But the super slow pace, and the deceptively bland first act about an evidently bored wife trying to play Nancy Drew and possibly solve a mystery that might not even exist, makes it hard to care about Kidman’s character. Besides, Nancy’s credibility is derailed at the very beginning of Holland, which opens with her suspecting her son’s babysitter of stealing an earring, only one, not even the entire pair, which, obviously seems highly unlikely. Nancy’s son Harry (Jude Hill) spends most of the movie being upset with her, although towards the climax, there’s a significant shift in their relationship.
Matthew MacFadyen’s role is relatively small in comparison to that of Kidman, but manages to be unsettling as Fred Vandergroot, whose patience and forgiving attitude towards Nancy makes you start questioning what their history is. He is almost always smiling, but one can sense something seething underneath, you just don’t know what. Nancy mentions how he ‘saves’ her and gives her a new life, but unfortunately, we never get their back story. Gael García Bernal as Nancy’s friend Dave provides the rare comical moments in Holland, and most of them aren’t necessarily intentional. Dave is shifty, an ‘outsider’ in the town, whose attempts to help Nancy seem to stem more from a need to belong than from any real romance or affection between them.
If there’s one thing I really liked about Holland, it’s the way it cleverly portrays people trapped in self-dug graves. Nancy feels bored and trapped in her marriage, but instead of taking the straightforward route to end it, she tries to uncover an affair, hoping to pin the blame on Fred and secure easy custody of their son. She’s the kind of person who prioritizes social status and appearances, even if maintaining the facade comes at a high personal cost. The town thus becomes representative of people like her, it’s merely a hollow imitation of the place they aspire to be in, but comes nowhere close. The film attempts to be a biting thriller but ends up only half-engaging, despite a fairly intense climax. If the first half had been more tightly written, Holland could have been far more memorable.
Rating: 2.5 on 5. Watch ‘Holland’ on Prime Video.
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