Directed by Mimi Cave — Screenplay by Andrew Sodorski
In 2022, Mimi Cave’s debut feature FRESH, a thriller about dating with a wicked twist, was one of the, ahem, freshest surprises of the year. Naturally, this always makes you curious about the director’s next step. For her sophomore effort, Mimi Cave dropped her first film’s very modern narrative and feel in favor of an early 2000s narrative set in a quirky Michigan suburbia. Cave’s Holland is a psychological drama with thriller elements that is set in Holland, Michigan (hence the title), which is a town settled by Dutch-Americans and which prominently displays its Dutch cultural identity with tulip fields and windmills. The film follows Nancy Vandergroot (played by Nicole Kidman), a teacher who is starting to suspect that her husband, Fred (played by Matthew Macfadyen, is living a double life on his many work trips. To figure out what is going on, she teams up with a colleague, shop teacher Dave Delgado (played by Gael García Bernal), to spy on her husband and investigate his optometrist office. However, in that process, Nancy may have bitten off more than she can chew, as her husband’s secrets aren’t exactly what she expected, while, at the same time, she starts having an affair with Dave.
If her first film had freshness and bite, Cave’s second film is both about, and hindered by, a lack of freshness and bite. The film is concerned with the well-trod territory of midwestern malaise — at one point, Kidman’s character remarks that her life “is like carbon monoxide. It’s so sleepy and comfortable.” — and, for far too long, the film feels stale and lifeless, as you’re waiting for any slight jolt to wake you up. Those jolts do happen from time to time, as Cave has thought up some really well-executed and really neat dream sequences, but the film struggles to escape the general sense that you’ve seen this done better elsewhere. That is, until a third act development rediscovers that bite that made Cave’s first film so thrilling. Whether that bloody, violent development is too predictable or too little, too late for you will likely vary from person to person. But I think it is fair to say that the filmmaker fails to spread out the film’s thrills in a way that keeps you hooked, while, at the same time, also not getting enough out of the quirky setting.
The film, like Cave’s debut, does have star-power, and Nicole Kidman predictably turns in a competent and well-measured performance that meets the tone and style Cave is going for. Disappointingly, Rachel Sennott disappears from the film after, I think, a single scene, while Gael García Bernal and his role are disappointingly bland. Macfadyen fares fairly well here, but it isn’t quite the post-Succession vehicle that he may have dreamt up. On the whole, although there are things here that I genuinely liked quite a bit, it is merely a competent but, for long stretches, disappointingly dull and stale feature. Hopefully, Cave’s third feature will recapture some of the excitement of her debut.
5.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 