Holland

dir: Mimi Cave

2025

I like weird. I live for weird.

Weird alone is not enough. If a film is going to trade in weird, it has to go so, so far, in order to justify itself if it doesn’t make any earthly sense.

David Lynch earned that honour, that distinction. Mimi Cave, as much as I loved her previous film Fresh, about a woman trying to survive at the hands of a cannibal, that goodwill doesn’t carry over enough for me to enjoy this flick as much, if at all.

Holland is set in Holland, which is a town in the state of Michigan, in the United States (States united by their supplication to a cankerous enthroned poltroon). Not Holland the country in Europe, nor New Holland, the name they tried on for Australia which never took (even though colonisation caught on in a big way).

Holland, Michigan is a real place that has a lot of the imagery and accoutrements that people stereotypically associate with Holland the country, as if everyone in Holland wanders around wearing peasant garb and clogs, tilting at windmills and chewing on tulips. It’s a weird sounding place, but then every place in America looks weird when looked at from the outside: they’re all fucking nuts, many of whom gladly voted for one of the worst cretins in human history.

Speaking of which, our main character is Nancy (Nicole Kidman), who seems somewhat nutty right from the start. She speaks, whether in person or in voiceover, in a breathy, baby-like voice that Marilyn Monroe herself would have mocked. Nancy has struggled with something in the past, maybe mental health, maybe with paying for the bills for her plastic surgery, but in Holland, she has found some kind of sanctuary, and respite from her past. By being an idealised wife and mother, by making meatloaf like she’s a 50s housewife (it’s set in 2000), she’s meant to be fulfilled.

Her husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen, what a waste of such a great actor) plays her appalling husband who speaks only in golly gees and goshes all the fucking time is so painfully, painstakingly buttoned-down that we soon suspect, like Nancy does, that something must be going on.

They have a kid, Harry (Jude Hill, another good actor wasted; he was so great as the lead in Belfast playing a young Kenneth Branagh), but he’s just a kid with a bowl cut and glasses and little else to add to the story.

It is a long, long time into the film before we actually find out what Nancy’s problem is. And I’m not referring to the plot, the terrible, quite stupid plot that also takes a million years to reveal what’s actually going on in the film. No, I’m referring to what Nancy’s unaddressed, unspoken, unarticulated complaint actually is. It’s so simple that I laughed when I finally got it, but it’s only something we see once there’s a sex scene between perfect wife Nancy and perfect optometrist husband Fred: he’s a crap and selfish lover who gives no thought to Nancy’s pleasure or sexual needs. She is profoundly unsatisfied sexually in her marriage.

All of Fred’s gee golly gosh statements about how they just need to overlook certain things and press the reset button and do everything right for the town’s sake and for Harry’s sake can’t paper over the fact that Nancy hungers for sexual release.

Like… okay, so Nancy has a friend at the school where she teaches home ec, and, not to put too fine a point on it, but Nancy, like Nicole Kidman, is nearly six foot tall. Her friend, who she fixates on somewhat, to help her in her investigation of what the fuck her husband is actually up to, is played by the wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal as Dave. To be really unfair, he’s a wonderful actor, and has been for decades, but he’s a short arse. A short king. There’s a reason why so many of the characters’ awkward scenes are with them sitting next to each other in a car.

As if Kidman hadn’t suffered enough at the hands of both the Church of Scientology and at the pope both of Scientology and of the short kings, being Tom Cruise. I refuse to believe that Kidman, in life, or playing any character, would seek sexual satisfaction from someone shorter than her poisonous dwarf of an ex.

She really wants satisfaction, but somehow being some kind of noble chap, Dave cockblocks himself, fearing that, because he’s the Only Mexican in the Village, that if they mash their pink bits together, he might get deported if they don’t have leverage on Fred.

There are these weird instances where Dave talks about having had trouble with the cops, and how hostile people are towards him in the town, because he’s from a Mexican background, but it’s two people specifically. The guy who formerly drove the school bus gets fired, and starts stalking Dave, and even though Dave reaches out and tries to talk to a student with bruises on his face, being the son of that bus driver, both of those idiots harass him at his home yet prove less to be stolid MAGA types, and more are just chubby losers easily bested by a short man with a baseball bat.

Why is this in the film? I don’t know, other than that Nancy gets really turned on by seeing Dave pound those losers with his baseball bat.

I mean, after all, it’s Gael Garcia Bernal pounding guys with a blunt object, what’s not to like. But in terms of the film itself, it feels like there’s a lot of bits missing in a film I would not have wanted to be any longer, in fact, maybe losing half an hour would have made it less painful.

Admittedly, I’m something of a strange person, so the next thing I relate could solely be in my own head and nothing to do with any of the thinking behind this flick: it did remind me of something from The Simpsons. Their long-suffering goody-two shoes neighbour Ned Flanders at one point decides he can’t stand living next to the Simpsons anymore, and decides to move to the perfect town, being Humbleton, in Pennsylvania. In the real world, there are these ultra twee figurines called Hummel figurines, but in The Simpsons, to avoid copyright issues, they changed it to Humble figurines, which Flanders collects, hence the desire to live in a perfect looking town that matches the aesthetics of the ceramics. All shiny, glazed surface, all hollow inside.

In this town, which is the utopia he’s always sought, a place that is all he could ever hope for, he’s a pariah, because of his moustache, which he refuses to shave, and thus is cast out of heaven.

Dave has a moustache. He’s the only Mexican in the town with a moustache. You do the math.

That’s not even to mention another episode where Homer specifically mentions that he wants to travel to the Tulip Time Festival in Holland, Michigan in his RV, and you can see how I might draw conclusions.

And yet, hell, anyone can draw conclusions and imagine links between disparate things, I think that’s called schizophrenia, so maybe I should shut up about it right about now.

There might have been a lot of thought behind the flick, but I don’t think (at all) that it coheres on screen or makes any consistent sense, or justifies our time. The “reveal”, such as it is, is delayed so long into the flick that a bigger, better twist would have been that Fred wasn’t what he’s revealed to be in the end.

The flick goes to such pains to paint the strange Dutch influenced town as perhaps being unreal, in that since Nancy is unreliable as a narrator, and has nightmares she can’t differentiate from reality, within a reality that seems artificial even within the context of the film’s “reality”, that we could be forgiven for thinking “maybe it’s all bullshit?”

But then there’s not enough going on with the town to make it menacing, or atmospheric, or visceral. It may be a real place in the world, but it doesn’t feel like a real place where this story is set. This is no Twin Peaks, or Silent Hill, or Stepford, Connecticut.

The performances are fairly mannered but not in a way that benefits the overall story or our viewing experience. And tonally, wow, is it all over the place. At first I thought they were going with “small town folk doing small town dumb bullshit with low stakes” to “bored housewife rebels against societal patriarchal strictures by investigating a mystery and maybe finding romance and intrigue” all the way to “dumb people doing dumb things and not checking when they think someone is dead” resulting in an ending that has lots of people dying or not dying, and then nothing matters and nothing maybe actually happened?

That kind of ending is possibly one of my least favourite endings of all time, but my sympathies compel me to give director Mimi Cave the benefit of the doubt, and assume that there’s a lot of stuff that was cut out of the flick by the producers in order to fulfil some different kind of vision. It’s terrible, but who am I to argue with the producers? They’re the ones that got it made, they’re the force behind its creation.

Oh, wait, no, Kidman is one of the producers, so fuck them. This is bad, so bad, so unbelievably bad, that I can’t believe the same director made Fresh which was, I thought at the time, so good.

I could be wrong. They could both be terrible.

3 times this is a complete waste of a Wambsgam out of 10

“Sometimes in life you just have to follow the clues, wherever they take you.” – yeah well maybe don’t next time - Holland

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3045628/