Like Duke University disliking its association with the incestuous/generally psychotic Ratliff family of The White Lotus, certain residents of Holland, Michigan may not like the town’s newfound association with Holland. Though only the second film from Mimi Cave, who previously directed 2022’s Fresh, it’s clear she’s establishing herself as a director with a taste for the, shall we say, perverse. Sure, Holland may not involve murder of the cannibalistic variety, but it does involve murder (once again, focused on the brutalization of women).
However, that “unseemly” topic doesn’t come up until the second act. Whereas the first act is all about setting the tone of the quietly stifling suburban atmosphere that makes Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) seem as though her already thinly-veiled veneer is cracking at an exponential rate. As she eventually tells her co-worker, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), “It’s like carbon monoxide, it, it’s so sleepy and comfortable, I don’t even know that I’m suffocating.” Yes, it sounds a lot like the “comfortable concentration camp” Betty Friedan referred to in The Feminine Mystique, in addition to tying in nicely with the theme of The Stepford Wives, which is, as depicted through a horror-y/sci-fi slant, the total suppression of the self in order to fit in with the herd. Particularly as a woman.
That Holland also takes place in the early 2000s (which becomes crystal clear around the time that Nancy flashes a DVD rental [later revealed to be none other than Mrs. Doubtfire] in a bid to lure her son away from his plans to sleep over at a friend’s) is also a “tool,” of sorts, for getting across the message that it’s “a different time.” One during which, believe it or not, things were even more repressive and gender-restrictive than they are now. Plus, it’s the 2000s in a small town, which means it might as well be the 1950s (to that end, it’s not a coincidence that the Nicole Kidman-starring version of The Stepford Wives was remade in 2004). One can only make the conjecture that at least part of screenwriter Andrew Sodorski’s motive in setting the narrative during this period was for evoking such a connotation. This in addition to the fact that, from a technological standpoint, it wasn’t as easy to keep tabs on people as it is in the present. And, since Nancy’s husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), is the type of man, it turns out, that she ought to keep tabs on, it turns more into a tactile sleuthing endeavor (often very much in homage to Hitchcock, soundtrack included) as opposed to the internet search and iPhone tracking methods that would be employed now.
Joining her in solving the mystery of where her optometrist husband really goes on all these impromptu “business trips” is Dave, increasingly smitten with this blonde, and yes, rather Dutch-looking woman (she even says grace at the table in Dutch, for fuck’s sake). What’s more, setting the stage circa 2000 makes the climate of a small town ripe for blatantly discriminating against pretty much the only “brown folk” in town. And, what with it being the Bush years, that kind of overt white supremacy was on almost as much blast as it is now, during the Orange One years.
As Holland progresses, it becomes apparent that some of the criticism lobbed against it might have to do with the fact that it often doesn’t appear to know “what it wants to be,” toggling between semi-supernatural thriller (via the many dream sequences related to Fred’s creepy, train-based model of the town) and domestic drama. But, in all honesty, why can’t it be both? Why does it have to choose? Perhaps the answer lies in how Fred, ultimately, has to choose (against his will, of course) between one of his two lives after Nancy and Dave expose him for what he is: a homicidal maniac targeting women, as most serial killers are wont to do.
Early indications of his contempt for women are made apparent in the way he instructs their son, Harry (Jude Hill), on how to “deal with” his upset mother, telling him, “This is how women are. Things seem huge one day, and then, a couple days later, it’s like it never happened.” Ah, the casual misogyny of it all. And it’s not as though Harry is seeing much in the way of a “strong woman” figure that would lead him to give his mother much respect. After all, this is a person who, when complemented on her meat loaf, tells Fred, “[I used] brown mustard instead of yellow. I felt like doing something a little crazy.”
That switching mustard types is the height of “crazy” in a milieu like this is probably the reason why people end up going on undercover murderous rampages. Then again, that sort of “coping mechanism” is generally only reserved for white men like Fred. But so long as he “keeps it separate,” covers it up, then it “doesn’t count.” Not by the “logic” of suburban repression. Hence, Nancy having the audacity to tell Dave, after everything he’s been through/subjected to in order to unearth Fred’s dirty secret, “We just keep it hidden. That’s what we do.” Her reason, of course, is “well-intentioned.” She doesn’t want Harry to go through life being known as the spawn of a serial killer. So it is that, as predicted, her romance with Dave was doomed from the start. And, naturally, there’s always the question of whether she was simply using him the entire time. Her motive for “falling in love” not entirely pure. Granted, Dave doesn’t seem to care either way, remarking, “She really saw me” as the film comes to a close.
And as it does, images—little vignettes, if you will—from Fred’s town model (Holland is the “model town,” after all) appear as both Nancy and Dave eventually share the same question, delivered via voiceover: “Sometimes I wonder: was it even real?” On the one hand, the query relates to how a town so fake could ever be perceived as real. But on the other, it relates to both of them questioning if what they went through could possibly be real because it was all so unfathomably traumatic. As for Nancy, she decides to do what she has long done as a “Stepford wife” of Holland: just suppress it. Bury it all inside of herself and keep living in a town that she previously described as part of her “carbon monoxide experience.” Dave, however, can’t go on living there, taking the events surrounding Fred’s demise as a welcome opportunity to flee a place that always treated him as an outsider.
In many regards, Holland has all the trappings of an A24 movie (including its Midsommar-esque promo poster), as did Fresh. Yet both are released through Amazon Studios (now Amazon MGM Studios). And one wonders, perhaps, if Holland might have been slightly more embraced if it were under the A24 umbrella, as if people might better be able to accept its “weirdness” that way. Instead, many critics have come for its plot and characters, deeming both to be flimsy. Moreover, there’s also the callout about how extremely reminiscent it is of another movie Kidman already starred in: 1995’s To Die For.
And yes, there are definitely some noticeable connections between the two. Starting with Nancy being a dissatisfied married teacher in a small town who gets a man that’s in love with her to kill her husband for her. The nuanced differences being that Dave is not a student, but a fellow teacher (therefore, he’s “age appropriate”), and Nancy’s husband is actually a depraved asshole, whereas Suzanne’s Stone’s husband, Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon), in To Die For is not.
Despite (or maybe because of) the noticeable references that Holland pulls from (mainly, The Stepford Wives and To Die For), it stands apart as a worthy contribution to the genre best described as “suburban nightmare.”
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