Holland (2025)

Holland arrives as a psychological thriller set in the year 2000, in a Michigan town of tulips and windmills, where Nicole Kidman's Nancy teaches school and suspects her optometrist husband of leading a second life. Director Mimi Cave, working from a script that sat on the 2013 Blacklist for a decade, trades in chilly suburban dread and a mounting sense of wrongness. The film is competently assembled, occasionally striking to look at, and ultimately a little hollow, which the critical consensus has already noted with some enthusiasm. Matthew Macfadyen plays the husband with a pleasant vacancy that curdles nicely once the train model in the basement starts resembling a crime scene.

For those of us who keep the ledger, the cultural accounting here is modest. A woman directs a female-driven story in which the wife eventually dispatches her predatory spouse, though the film treats this as genre mechanics, not manifesto. Gael Garcia Bernal appears in a substantial supporting role, and the rest of the ensemble is white, which is to say the casting reflects ordinary Hollywood practice and nothing more. Race never enters the frame as subject or subtext. Neither does class, climate, body image, or neurodivergence. The film has no interest in any of it, and it makes no claims about history that would require correcting.

That leaves a thriller that wants to unsettle and mostly manages a shrug. There is no sermonizing, no moral delivered from a pulpit, no lecture appended to the final act. The film's ideas, such as they are, arrive through plot, which is the old-fashioned way and, in this case, the only way. It is a minor entry in a long tradition of stories about the rot beneath the manicured lawn. Watchable. Forgettable. The ledger stays nearly blank, and there is something almost restful about that.