Holland Review – Twisty Nicole Kidman Thriller is a disappointing mess | SXSW film

Nicole Kidman Is generally a public service with its seemingly inexhaustible energy. She has consistently worked with female directors – 19 in the last eight years – While they also try to save the tight domestic thrillers from yesteryear and consistently examine the gap between the quiet public facades of women and private rust. The quality of Kidman’s performance – and she almost always delivers something weird, a little and very magnetic – does not indicate the quality of the project, which can vary from the provocative (if underwhelming) Baby girl to her personal Beach-read cinematic universe From mediocre TV roles.

Holland, the latest film by Kidman as Star and producer (under her Blossom films Banner), says Kidman in a well -known Groove: a housewife in the suburbs with secrets and suspicions, hit by paranoia and taxing to keep track of the performances. Just like many a Kidman character for her, Nancy Vandergroot Perfection China-Doll Smile, Coiffed Hair, Nuclear Family Diners and Nurses projects big feelings about the small deployment of her Fishbowl Environment. The trailer, released for the SXSW Film Festival by distributor Amazon Prime VideoPromises a Kidman version in the lane of the Stepford Wives – Eerie, Bros and Nerve -racking, with the extra craziness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic town that is locally famous for its annual Tulip Festival. In practice, it wastes the talents of his star, especially for this specific brand of disturbing, on a bizarre script that adds to nothing.

Holland is a more intention than implementation, it certainly looks stylish, because of a sharp direction through Mimi Cave, whose debut function from 2022 Fresh Weave skillfully the travails of modern dating in cunning and knots horror. This time working with a script by Andrew Sodroski – a script that bounced almost a decade, apparently for good reason around Hollywood – Cave, an old director of music videos, again shows a keen eye for the Portent in everyday, but struggles for a full 80 minutes.

The first 80 minutes Center Nancy’s suspect that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), An optometrist who is working or leaves for an extensive model train with their son, Harry (Jude Hill), has an affair, based on apparently nothing but vibes and possible manic paranoia. In the attempt to prove that her husband is unfaithful, Nancy, a home economy teacher, is affected in local high school, entangled in her colleague Dave (an underwilled Gael García Bernal), a Mexican immigrant who experiences racism when needed for the plot. The deeper Nancy and Dave enter into their amateur research – and if more than half of a film feels longer than his 108 minutes, it is a remarkably superficial deep – the more Nancy’s cared for world around her, the most provocative in a handful of nightmare – where Cave bends its capacities.

Although the script was initially completed in the present, Cave decided to set the film in the year 2000, as for no reason other than a soft nostalgia -pull and the handy location of Nancy’s search somewhere between the analogue (breaking in his office, old vouchers) and the budded digital (SMSs). Sodroski chose to determine the story in the Netherlands, apparently because people smile in wooden clogs and pointed hats ensures a particularly scary facade of normality. Cave, who grew up outside Chicago, makes a better work by standard Midwestern Kitsch – Little Caesars pizza and ceramic statues in glass containers, flowers wallpapers and ketchup designs on meat bread – than the city traditions, filmed as if they were not tense.

Yet there is a perceptible gap between the quality of the visuals, the horrifying atmosphere of destabilizing suspicion that cave conjures, and the actual material, which is just as thin as one of Nancy’s Dutch hats. Kidman is predictably effective in the housewife mode “Fair to Gosh” and dives into the fixations of Nancy with typical full bet. But both women are submitted by this story that comes out of the rails in the second half. No spoilers, but it is sufficient to say that some twists and heel walks feel undeserved to the point of the annoyance of the audience, all covered with a vague question what is real and what is not a cop-out than a complication.

That is a pity – Holland has all parts of a classic domestic thriller, the type that Kidman’s career has made and which film fans are still missing. In the last sum of the Kidman -Oeuvre I suspect that this will only be a footnote. However, if nothing else, it is more proof of a larger, valuable project.