Nicole Kidman’s new movie ‘Holland’ is a twisted ‘Stepford Wives’-like tale that has us on edge
I won't be tiptoeing through *those* tulips.
Nicole Kidman is at it again, playing a housewife on the verge of discovering a dark secret about her family and town. Nobody is doing it like her, and the trailer for her upcoming film Holland with Matthew Macfadyen and Gael García Bernal promises to be a colorful, comic, and terrifying ride.
Here’s what the film, which releases March 27 on Amazon Prime, is about. According to the official press release from Amazon Studios:
“In this wildly unpredictable thriller, Nicole Kidman is the meticulous Nancy Vandergroot, a teacher and homemaker whose picture-perfect life with her community pillar husband (Macfadyen) and son (Belfast‘s Jude Hill) in tulip-filled Holland, Michigan tumbles into a twisted tale. Nancy and her friendly colleague (García Bernal) become suspicious of a secret, only to discover nothing in their lives is what it seems.”
Director Mimi Cave also directed the delicious, hilariously dark comedy thriller Fresh. The instant cult classic starred Sebastian Stan as a serial cannibal opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones. That’s a promising indication of this movie’s tone and vibe. Rachel Sennott and Lennon Parham, two formidable comedic talents in their own right, also appear in Holland. The screenwriter, Andrew Sodorski, is the creator of the 2017 series Manhunt about the FBI’s search for the Unabomber.
In the Holland trailer, we glimpse Nancy’s seemingly idyllic life. She lives in a very real Dutch community in Holland, Michigan. (The town holds a “Tulip Time Festival” every year.) She has a normie husband and a cherubic son. But are things genuinely wholesome and historic, or are they sinister and backward?
While playing with model trains and figurines, the father waxes poetic about the beauty of controlling a narrative. That might hint at what’s lying below the surface of Nancy’s reality. She starts investigating, with García Bernal’s character and independently thanks to an old-fashioned microfiche machine–and appears to uncover secrets that, like the contents of Pandora’s box, she wishes she could forever unsee. “You know you should leave a scab alone,” she says. “Picking it, you’re only gonna hurt yourself.”
Eek! What’s the secret? What’s going on in Holland?! Is this a Stepford Wives situation, a Don’t Worry Darling situation, or something even more twisted? We’ll have to wait until March 27 to find out.
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