The eerie charm of a small European town suited Prime Video’s Holland, especially given its suspenseful setting in Holland, Michigan, in the early 2000s. This film’s CGI and miniature effects were some of the best in recent years, reminiscent of Beetlejuice or Heretic. Nicole Kidman, Gael García Bernal and Matthew Macfayden led with some great performances in this movie, but the lows were really consequential to making anyone care about what happened in this town.
Mimi Cave’s Holland tells the story of Nancy Vandergroot’s seemingly perfect life in Holland, which falls apart when she and her friend Dave Delgado discover a disturbing secret. Nancy suspects that her husband, Fred Vandergroot, is cheating on her when certain clues are not lining up. In this small town, things are not what they seem, and Fred might not be the trustworthy optometrist everyone believes.
Holland creatively integrated miniatures into its storytelling, showcasing a strong use of this film technique. Movies like Beetlejuice or its sequel and Heretic came to mind in great miniature use in film—more specifically, miniatures of people and not sci-fi ships like in Star Trek or Star Wars. The best scene in the movie was when Nancy was shrinking and running through the miniature Holland town that Fred and their son Harry Vandergroot created together.
Beetlejuice was praised for its practical effects, especially for how it matched the miniature version of a Connecticut town to the real one. Heretic was cool for the wooden miniature of Mr. Reed’s house used CGI to have tiny versions of the characters running through a miniature maze. Holland did this well, too, and understood this as the main focus of the movie. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by having unrefined characters and weird pacing flaws.
The small-town suspense flick felt like it was aiming for two vibes. For one part of Holland, Nancy felt like Mother in Nightbitch, and the other part felt like the suspense portion was like Longlegs. To a certain extent, this was a unique mashup of themes and goals, but it felt like the back half of the story was greatly paced.
“In what looked like a movie culminating in saying something about a mother reclaiming her power, Holland did not appear to have a solid lesson or moral.”
The first half of the story felt like a silly buddy-cop mystery, with Nancy and Dave searching the town for evidence of Fred cheating on Nancy. But somehow, the tone made a 180 when things were becoming complicated for Nancy and Dave. The ending was great, but the middle was a hodgepodge of concepts that did not work. They did not pay off to some of the underlying tones, like some of the racism Dave faced; this concept seemed shoe-horned in there.
In what looked like a movie culminating in saying something about a mother reclaiming her power, Holland did not appear to have a solid lesson or moral. On the most positive note, Nancy put her own happiness first. It nearly cost her relationship with her son, as she took a big risk worrying about her husband’s possible infidelity. Even when all the events unfolded, there was not a clear message the movie clearly left the audience with.
When the credits rolled, Holland tied up its story with a bow on top. However, the gift box was a mix-bag, with this film not knowing what it wanted to say. With so many European cult-suspense films like Midsommar and The Wicker Man, this one aimed to be a psychological thriller of the same quality. Sadly, this was not the Holland, Michigan-based thriller to get the job done in the end. Having these three talented leads was a missed opportunity to enhance the story.
