"Holland" Starring Nicole Kidman Is Disturbing—But Not In The Way You Might Expect

Holland starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen, and directed by Mimi Cave is marketed as a psychological thriller set in the idyllic and (we're led to assume) oppressive town of Holland, MI. The trailer is full of bright colors, intrigue, and hints of a terrible secret. From the teaser, I expected some type of commentary on an imagined sinister underbelly of the frugal, pragmatic, cloistered world of Holland. As a half-Dutch girl who lives in Michigan, I felt the need to see what kind of mockery Hollywood was going to make of my (admittedly extra) heritage. My husband and I watched it with another couple (the wife also happens to be part Dutch). We all love the real-life Holland, MI and were intrigued by the trailer.

Warning: This review contains spoilers. 

As it turns out, the movie has very little to do with Holland at all, and everything to do with unpacking whether or not Kidman's character (fittingly named Nancy Vandergroot) is crazy or incredibly intuitive. While the movie feels painfully uneven and awkward at times, it explores the contours of women's intuition, appearance versus reality, and the potentially lethal implications of extreme emotional manipulation and gaslighting. It's disturbing, but not necessarily in the ways viewers might expect if they've watched the trailer.

Not Everything Is As It Seems in Holland 

I'm not exactly sure what I expected from Holland, but I was emotionally exhausted by the end. If you’ve seen the trailer, you assume some kind of sinister and perhaps pervasive cult-like happenings will begin to occur. The story centers around a conventional family that appears happy on the surface, but the wife is obviously struggling (she tells another character that she feels as though her life is like breathing carbon monoxide–it's killing her without her even realizing it). However, it’s hard to tell what’s so terrible about Nancy’s life. Is she struggling with real injustices, or is she simply mentally disturbed? Sure, her husband is boring and infantilizes her a bit from the beginning of the movie, and her son wants to spend more time with his friends than with her, but from the outside, her life seems very quaint and stable. I knew something terrifying was brewing, but there was very little evidence of what that terrible something would be, since Nancy’s life is so mundane on the surface. 

Nancy’s husband Fred appears to be a standard family man. He’s a local optometrist, has a model train village he works on with his son, and enthusiastically compliments Nancy’s cooking. He’s obviously not an exciting lover, and he seems to deal with Nancy’s apparent hysteria over small mishaps with a bit of dissociation and apathy, but he is not unlike the trope of the middle-aged father seen in many movies. He’s completely boring and seemingly harmless. Fred does exhibit some strange and controlling behaviors (not to mention some plain old creepy vibes) that surface early on, but to an unknowing observer, they could be chalked up to being nothing more than the actions of a burned-out and complacent husband who’s trying to keep a handle on peace in his home. 

The first half of the movie appears to be a series of dead ends, as the audience is nearly convinced that Kidman's character Nancy is just a paranoid, fretful wife who believes her husband must be having an affair. Time and time again, we watch her make cringe-worthy mistakes as she assumes Fred is cheating on her, when in reality, all of his suspicious behaviors end up leading to perfectly normal resolutions. For example, Nancy calls a jewelry shop when she finds a receipt from a recent purchase made by Fred. She even asks the business if Fred said anything about buying jewelry for his mistress. Shortly after, she walks into her bedroom to find that Fred bought her a beautiful jewelry box. 

This strikes as a very thoughtful jester, since Nancy recently lost one of her most treasured earrings (she finds it in a container of buttons by her sewing station, despite being convinced that the babysitter is at fault). Inside the jewelry box is another earring Nancy lost while snooping in Fred’s office (trying to find evidence of his alleged affair). Nancy realizes how paranoid she’s been, and resolves to be a better wife. Fred forgives her easily and offers her his classic proposal to “reset” things. Life goes on, but Nancy still feels unfulfilled. 

In addition to her paranoia, Nancy falls for a man from her work named Dave (Gael García Bernal), further complicating the audience's ability to root for her. My husband observed part way through the movie that Nancy was becoming all the things she espouses to hate and believes Fred is doing (lying regarding her whereabouts, cheating, etc.). Even while Nancy still has zero proof that Fred is having an affair, she falls in love with Dave and begins an affair with him (it’s not quite clear if they ever go beyond making out). 

Ironically, it is Dave’s acceptance towards Nancy’s suspicions and his willingness to entertain her fears that causes them to become emotionally close in the first place. Once they share a moment of passion, Dave’s motivation for uncovering Fred’s secrets changes course: he wants Nancy to have evidence that Fred is cheating so that she can justify a divorce and start a new life with him. To Dave’s credit, he doesn’t want to sneak around and have an illicit under-raps relationship. He wants all or nothing. Nancy and Dave decide they need to find concrete evidence that Fred is cheating, so they arrange a plan to follow him on his next “work trip.” 

On their adventure, Nancy and Dave observe Fred as he goes about his day. In the evening, Dave keeps an eye on Fred so Nancy can try to sneak into his room. Dave sits close to Fred at the hotel bar and hears him tell the bartender about his wife and work–all very normal conversations. In fact, Fred sounds wistful about hoping that someday he and Nancy could have a different life outside of Holland. As Fred leaves the bar, Dave tries to accost him to give Nancy more time. Fred thinks Dave is hitting on him and tells Dave he has the wrong idea—he’s happily married. 

And Just Like That, Holland Earns Its R Rating 

At this point, I was majorly confused. This movie is rated R. I knew it was headed south, and I had a feeling Fred was bad news. But the cards were not in Nancy’s favor at this point. After a night spent in Dave’s car outside the hotel, Nancy and Dave separate—Nancy has to go pick up her son Harry from a friend’s house. Dave is tasked with following Fred. This is when, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, things take a turn and the story becomes very dark very quickly. It turns out Fred is, in fact, hiding something. 

When Nancy gets home, she realizes that the pictures she stole from Fred’s office correspond with different houses in the massive model train setup Fred and Harry have in the garage. After some sleuthing, Nancy stumbles upon the realization that the houses are real places— and that they are the homes of various murder victims with no known suspect. 

In a bizarre twist of events, we find out Fred is actually a serial killer who has murdered dozens of women through the years (assumedly by first wooing and then eventually killing them). The once-seemingly stupid and paranoid Nancy begins to realize that the situation is far more dire than she ever could have believed. 

Holland is disturbing because its transition from slow-moving domestic thriller to cold-blooded crime scene feels like an unbelievable stretch—and not in a satisfying way.

Once she realizes the truth, she is unable to fully process the depths of its significance. Nancy, though suspicious of everything, cannot fully come to terms with the devastating truth. When Dave returns, he tells Nancy a modified and reduced version of what happened—he caught Fred cheating and he told him he could never, ever show his face again— further purporting the idea that Nancy cannot fully reckon with the disturbing reality. He then wants Nancy to run away with him. The full truth is that Dave has actually witnessed Fred carving up a murder victim’s body. He ends up fighting with Fred, who winds up at the bottom of a lake with a knife in his gut. Nancy naively believes Fred will not return, because she trusts Dave and cannot bear to know the details. However, she insists that things must appear normal, and that they cannot leave until Tulip Time is over. 

Of course, this ending would be too easy, so naturally, Fred somehow resurfaces (literally) and ends up coming to the Tulip Time festival where Harry is one of the children “Dutch dancing” in the parade. After a dramatic assortment of events, Nancy ends up killing Fred in their car on the way home. Perhaps the craziest part? I was sitting there waiting for Fred to try to murder Nancy and their son, but I realized later that that was part of the point. Fred never has any intention of killing them. In fact, when he realizes Nancy knows the truth, he tries to tell her that things can go back to normal. He reminds her that he’s never hurt her, and that he is her loving husband. He tried to “reset” things yet again. He's a psychopath who somehow has been able to keep his charming, perfect, white-picket-fence Holland life seemingly separate from his alter ego. Nancy is finally brave enough to face reality. Once she does, there is no going back.  

In general, I flatly refuse to watch horror movies, and I was unsure of exactly what to expect with Holland. I watched it because my Dad is entirely Dutch and grew up about 40 minutes from the movie's namesake. Unfortunately, only a couple of shots were actually filmed in Holland's iconic location. The rest was filmed in Tennessee. Would I have watched this film if I had known the story would have essentially nothing to do with my heritage and a town I dearly love? Probably not. But here are my takeaways after being an unsuspecting victim (pun intended) of Holland’s appealing advertising. 

Holland is Disturbing Because it’s Unclear if Anything is Real 

The movie is jarringly uneven, and while it could be argued that that is an artistic choice, it is nevertheless exhausting. In the first half, it's hard to root for Nancy at all. She's heavy-handed, paranoid, and simply seems like a menopausal and overly-emotional wife who's ready to cheat on the husband she is convinced is cheating on her. By the end, we're ready for Nancy to be liberated from her murderous husband, and viewers are teased in the last 30 seconds of the movie that Dave may not even be real (he may actually be a figment of Nancy's imagination that prompts her towards the truth). If we accept this narrative, then Nancy would be less infantile than she otherwise appears, she would not be guilty of an affair, and she would never have had Dave’s confirmation of the truth. Fred himself knows that Nancy is aware of the truth, and so his admission of guilt is ultimately what prompts Nancy to action—regardless of if Dave is real or a figment of her imagination.

Viewers are left to wonder: could it be that we’ve simply been inside of Nancy’s mind the whole time? As many have pointed out, the film ends with Dave and Nancy asking “Sometimes I wonder: was it even real?”

As Rafael Motamayor of Inverse  points out, “The more ‘clues’ Nancy seems to gather, the crazier and more surreal her situation becomes. Several dream (or nightmare) sequences aim to keep the audience guessing whether Nancy is crazy or she's actually the only sane person in the town.”

As we sat there, we went from laughing at how recognizable Nancy’s behavior is at the beginning of the film as the trope of an overly concerned Midwestern mom, to cringing as she continues to make one faux pas after another and hurls towards the definition of “unhinged.” The storyline line is unsettling from the start, and you can never quite relax. The movie is confusing because it is neither a hard-core thriller nor a muder-mystery, which made me unsettled. An article by ABC sums it up perfectly: “As it is, Holland is neither camp nor wry enough to descend into a full-blown farce, nor serious enough to be an actual propulsive crime mystery thriller.” Holland is disturbing because its transition from slow-moving domestic thriller to cold-blooded crime scene feels like an unbelievable stretch—and not in a satisfying way.

Ultimately, Holland Offers A Substantive Yet Uncompelling Commentary on Women’s Intuition

Perhaps the primary reason Holland is disturbing is because about halfway through the movie, viewer and Nancy alike are convinced she’s crazy. Her intuitions have led her to make unfounded and seemingly silly accusations, and to make imprudent and selfish choices. And yet, at the end of the day, Nancy’s gut instincts are right—Fred is lying, and though the truth is far beyond anything she could have imagined, her intuition was not simply a cruel joke. In fact, it’s a reliable asset that helps free Nancy from a life of false pretense and stifling and unsustainable perfection. Even so, Holland doesn’t do anything to redeem Nancy’s intuition (unless you count her ridding this earth of Fred as a redemptive moment). Instead of showing Nancy using her womanly instincts to crack a case and then handle it with maturity and grace, the whole ending is grotesque, bizarre, and ambiguous (we’re not even allowed to know if it was real, for crying out loud). Additionally, in the process, Nancy begins to become what she fears her husband is: a liar and a cheater. By the end, she (like him) even has blood on her hands. She becomes what she fears. We’re supposed to believe she’s liberated at the end, but somehow the ending feels hollow and insufficient. 

At the end of the day, Holland had the potential to be an artistically and philosophically interesting and intense movie. Unfortunately, the uneven nature of the film, paired with a mediocre script can’t be redeemed solely by the talented cast’s capable and good-faith effort. The ambiguous close of the film left me more unsettled than satisfied. After such a painful ordeal, I had hoped for something conclusive to mull over, even if I didn’t like its implications. But maybe that is the point—nothing in Holland is as it seems.