Holland Review: A Knock-Off Stepford Wife Awakening In Sloth Mode

There’s nothing wrong with a slow burn story. Give me nothing but weird, atmospheric vibes and actors chewing the scenery like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I’ll lap it up. Some of the best horror/psychological thrillers—be it Zodiac (2007), Nope (2022), or Hereditary (2018)—take their time, letting the tension simmer until it explodes into something unforgettable. But that’s not Mimi Cave’s Holland (2025). This is a whole lot of nothing stretched over two hours, with just enough half-baked twists to make you think something’s coming and it never does.

Holland—which recently released on Amazon Prime video and is written by Andrew Sodroski—stars Nicole Kidman as Nancy Vandergroot, the perfect suburban wife. Her placid life in the idyllic small mid-western town of Holland, Michigan is seemingly tranquil. The film starts with Nancy suspecting her babysitter (played by Bottoms and Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott in an inexplicably short role) of stealing just one earring. Not the pair—just the one. That’s all it takes for Nancy’s paranoia to spiral. But is she simply being silly or deluding herself from something bigger?

With a penchant for mysteries that is rebuffed as “silly” by both her husband and her lover, Nancy shifts focus and begins suspecting her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), of having an affair. He goes to too many conferences in far off towns even though he’s just an optometrist. He owns a Polaroid camera, but there are no Polaroid photos in their house. And we know who likes to keep Polaroid photos as trophies from watching enough true crime and period murder mysteries.

Then there is Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), a charming, brooding shop teacher at the same local school Nancy teaches. On his good days he calls child protective services on a student he believes is being abused; on his bad days, his house is attacked, he is called racial slurs and the same student he stood up for asks him to “go back where he came from.” This could have been a powerful and timely commentary on America’s rising racial tensions; instead, it’s thrown in haphazardly. This subplot also ends up becoming one more unexplored element in a film that can’t decide what it wants to be.

Nancy puts her amateur detective hat on and decides to break into Fred’s office to look for clues. She recruits Dave’s help to catch Fred philandering. They have several run-ins together but Fred cannot seem to remember his face. And this is hard to believe when that face happens to belong to Gael García Bernal! The film has several such discrepancies and just expects us to roll with it all. Nancy finds enough damning evidence that points to something far more deceptive and disturbing than philandering, but the film still does not pick up pace.

Bernal’s Dave, whose entire arc is muddled by the film’s clumsy attempts at social commentary, is even more forgettable. All we know about him is that he is new in this weirdly Dutch-obsessed American town and his sole motivation to do anything in the film is his desire to be with Nancy. And Nancy is a bored suburban stereotype, better manifestations of which have existed in cinema before. Stepford Wives (1975) is a prime example, more so because Kidman has starred in its 2004 remake. Holland tries to be a lot of things and ends up being nothing but a cheap, knock-off Stepford Wives aspirant. By the time the big reveal finally arrives, it’s time to mop the popcorn off the floors and go home. There is no deeper commentary here. The story itself is nonsense despite being so tropey.

Speaking of pointless, Macfadyen is wasted as Fred. We know Macfadyen can act. From the dreamy Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (2005) to the slimy Tom Wambsgans in Succession (2018–2023)—the man has range. But here he’s playing a serial killer with the energy of a man who got stuck in traffic on the way to his accountant job and never quite recovered. He doesn’t exude menace; he just exists as a half-hearted attempt at a villain without an intimidating bone in his body.

Kidman, usually magnetic, is similarly squandered. She’s meant to be unraveling, but thanks to whatever procedures she’s subjected her face to, her expressions barely move. Ironically, at certain junctures her frozen face is creepier than anything in the film itself. Every time she tries to emote, it’s like watching something trapped in the uncanny valley. There’s an entire conversation to be had about the pressures put on women in the public to look a certain way, but that is for another time.

Holland is confused from start to finish. It wants to be a psychological thriller, but it lacks tension. It wants to be a mystery, but there’s nothing worth solving. It wants to be a social commentary, but it doesn’t know what it’s saying. If it was trying to be satirical, then it spectacularly fails there too. And structurally? It’s a disaster. Scenes feel out of order and stretched too thin, the dialogues are repetitive without rhythm, and the pacing is abysmal.

Holland attempts to use Dutch culture as an unsettling backdrop for something sinister, much like Ari Aster’s take on paganism in Hereditary and Midsommar (2019). But where Aster builds immersive dread, Holland feels puzzlingly hollow. Despite my reservations about Aster’s lens reducing pagan traditions to eerie, cult-like horror tropes, he at least commits to a distinct vision. While Midsommar explores themes of isolation, grief, codependency, and the seductive power of cult mindsets, Hereditary delves into generational trauma and the inescapability of fate. Holland attempts to explore themes of suburban paranoia, infidelity, and identity, but it fails to delve deeply into any of them. The film hints at psychological tension, but never fully commits to exploring the complexities of its characters.

By the time the credits rolled, I was left appreciating my own editing skills. Editing a movie, in essence, is similar to self-editing an article you’ve written: you move paragraphs around, cut the fluff, refine the flow. But Holland feels like someone dumped all the right ingredients into a pot and still somehow made the wrong soup. At the end of the day, this isn’t a whodunit or even a howdunit. This is a ‘he did what now?’ moment stretched into a feature-length film. And if that’s the best they could do, maybe Holland should have stayed off the map.

Debiparna Chakraborty is an independent Film, TV and Pop Culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010.