There is a scene in the Searing Amazon Prime series ”Expats“Where Nicole KidmanCharacter, a Pength American who lives in Hong Kong, breaks into the neighbor’s apartment, convinced that he might kidnapp his missing son. By picking up a couple of binoculars and keeps them in the face, by his personal effects, she can see what the neighbor may have seen from the window across the road. Or maybe, to understand, “What is binoculars? How do they work?” It’s an unintentional comic moment, and that’s pretty much what happens throughout Amazon Prime Videos latest partnership with Kidman and her Blossom movies, “Holland. ”
Kidman plays here another, less happy housewife, Nancy Vandergroot, in Mimi Cave’s Thriller, and as in the poorly thought but retrospective Campy 2004 remake by Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives”, she is back to the cake, Picket-nucked world of pruning. Director Mimi Cave showed filmmaking promise with its horror comedy 2022 “Fresh,” Where a woman discovers that her hot boyfriend can be a cannibal. While her taste for the stylish and grotesque is on full screen in the golden-hued country HollandMichigan, Cave’s work here is weighed by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-Penerne manus that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get started. Then the movie is over.
Nancy is a tea -eyed trade and teacher of home economy in a fictional, whimsical Dutch affected city that is adorned with windmills and bonnet where life, as Nancy says is “as carbon monoxide, sleepy and comfortable.” Her seemingly easy -to -use husband, Fred (Matthew Macfady), is an optician, and it’s ironic, right, because he can’t see her. At the same time, their young son, Harry (Jude Hill), arrives at the age where he may prefer a sleep with friends over movie-and-pizza night with his mother. Oh, for reasons that aren’t explained or suggested beyond nostalgia for its own sake, “Holland” is set in the year 2000, and we are left to figure this out based on small anachronistic clues: the windows 2000 iCon Undtulant on Nancy’s desktop Moment where she sings Annie Lennox’s 1995 Chart-Topping Cover “No More I Love You’s” Alone at Home, A Private Reverie to remember easier times.
It is an exciting idea that almost suggests “Holland” will end up something closer to M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village”, where Holland, Michigan, is a false utopian bubble that Nancy has presented. But Sodorski’s script is much more conventional and plays like a simple domestic thriller, when Nancy loses an earring and unintentionally discovers boxes with polaroids in the middle of peace things that give it that something is not right with this world. Or hers. She has a maybe too close friendship with her colleague, Dave (Gael García Bernal), who is too willing to help her in an amateur investigation when her curiosity begins to terrorize her, and she thinks peace can be up to something horrible.
And it turns out he is. But “Holland” takes so long to get us there that we have already taken up future events when it does. “Holland” has really candy -colored style that goes for it, with “midsummer” and “hereditary” film photographer Pawel Pogorzelski which ventilates calmly and some inspired images for the gloomy suburb. Or when Dave has a vision of being consumed by Pomeranians after a certain guilt and incredible revelation. But frustrating, filmBest moments-as is often the case in Schlocky thrillers with an A-list under the pedigree under the line-is in fact only dream sequences that draw on an illusion of a deeper, more surreal world under the otherwise prosaic “Holland” paints on the surface.
Kidman’s performance is blowing panic enough, but in a Filmography that has an all-timer after the other In addition to a churn of duds like this one, the stain of “Holland” will not affect it. She is skilled at vault between pre-“feminist mystique” stepford ditziness and a more keyed, modern woman, but what happens around her does not make a clogging worth. Why does peace, again, know an optician, not again the man who is dragging after him and stands in front of him as not only his wife’s dear colleague, but also the only color person in town? Dave’s place in society does not make a big eye -catching accomplice, especially when Dave and Nancy feelings for each other start to get messy and in the way. Nancy, who also does not take on a baseball cap that is hiding in Dave’s car to persecute his husband and discover that he may have been up to something murderous.
The stop and start “Holland” have had on the road-incumbent Errol Morris once attached to direct the project as early as 2013, and the film once called “Holland, Michigan”-has been well covered. The end result is a coherent vortex that clearly got lost in the editing, or was it saved by it? There is a decent movie here somewhere, but you would dig up many tulips to get to it.
Rating: c
“Holland” premiered at 2025 SXSW Film & TV festival. Amazon Prime Video debuts the movie on March 27.
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