Summary
Mimi Cave flirts with noir intrigue and heightened melodrama, but despite its stylish setup, it never quite digs beneath the surface of its influences.
Mimi Cave’s debut feature, Fresh, lived up to its title, subverting expectations and offering an original take on at least two genres. Her follow-up, HOLLAND, is no less ambitious in unravelling mysteries and thrillers, with a generous dash of Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic noir thrown in for good measure.
From the moment the film opens with a series of stylised shots depicting a miniature train-model recreation of the titular town, the narration prompts us to question, “Is it even real?” It’s a question Nancy (Nicole Kidman), a teacher in the quaint little town, soon finds herself asking when she begins to suspect that her optometrist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), is leading a double life due to his frequent absences.
In a move straight out of a mid-century noir, Nancy confides in fellow teacher Dave (Gael García Bernal) and soon draws him into her investigation of what Fred is really up to at all those conferences. As the tension mounts, so does the attraction between Nancy and Dave, leading to a web of deceptions that none of them can escape.
Geographically, Fargo, North Dakota, and Holland, Michigan, are a full day’s drive apart, separated by the width of Wisconsin. Yet Andrew Sodorski’s script isn’t all that far removed thematically from the dark humour of Coen Brothers’ Fargo, as suspicions and capers spiral into a series of escalating incidents that no one can quite escape.
Cave certainly leads into the heightened drama of the inspiration, along with being vaguely reminiscent of Kidman’s classic turn in To Die For. Alex Somers’ score swells just as loudly during romantic tryst as it does when Nancy drops her baking with a dramatic splat. The first time Nance is called a silly goose, it’s possible Sodorski is even aware of a certain meme.
Yet it never really moves beyond the surface level of those references, and Cave doesn’t fully capitalise on the setup of the first half. A series of coincidences and nightmarish cutaways lead naturally to a dramatic second-act turn, but without revealing too much, that turn risks making Cave’s singular focus feel like a repeated trick. It’s only the early 2000s setting and technology that help sustain the suspension of disbelief—set even a decade later, some of the plot’s leaps might not hold up.
Normally, at the end of this sort of film, you’d want to rewatch it to spot how many of the second-half revelations were subtly telegraphed in the first. The final moments certainly make us question whether anything we’ve seen is real or merely the construct of an unreliable narrator. But when all’s said and done, it feels like a fairly safe suburban drama that never strays too far from the mould.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Mimi Cave | WRITERS: Andrew Sodorski | CAST: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Gael García Bernal | DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Prime Video | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 27 March 2025
