Holland: Some Things Only Look Perfect

Director: Mimi Cave
Genre: Thriller
2025

Prime Video

“Every day, I get to wake up in the best place on earth. Holland, Michigan.”

So says Nicole Kidman’s Nancy Vandergroot at the beginning of the film Holland, now showing on Prime. Since I wake up every day in Holland, Michigan, too, I was curious to see my fair city in the movies.

I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I’m sorry to say, Holland is a dud, a movie with more plot holes than a piece of Swiss cheese (with no Gouda or Edam to be found). Toward the end of the movie, Jude Hill, as young Harry Vandergroot, tells his mother he doesn’t understand what’s happening. “That’s okay, Harry,” I said to my television, “none of the rest of us do, either.” 

Ostensibly, the movie casts Holland as a sort of Stepford, where there are dark secrets lurking beneath the perfect veneer of windmills and tulips. That certainly is territory worth exploring, as the aforementioned Stepford Wives has done, but the film tees this up and then swings and misses. 

Here’s an example: Gael Garcia Bernal is Dave Delgado, a Latino high school teacher who gets involved with Kidman’s character in many ways. In one scene, a character named Squiggs Graumann, who seems as if he will be the movie’s villain, calls Delgado a demeaning racial term. One of the dark sides of the actual Holland is the always uncertain relationship between our white and Latino communities. (In the real Holland, almost 50% of public school students are Hispanic and 35% are white.) The movie looked poised to explore the dark underside of racism in a “perfect” community, but then forgets it after this scene. Bernal is the only person of color in Holland. And Squiggs Graumann vanishes, never to threaten any of the characters again. I was waiting for him to come back with a big Trump flag flying from his red pickup truck. But he just disappears, like the babysitter in the first scene who looks like she’s going to be an interesting character but never appears again. (By the way, Nancy Vandergroot’s relationship with Delgado already borders on the inappropriate when the film begins. It proceeds from there, without explanation. Which is typical of the whole movie—lots of things happen that don’t make sense.)   

In Holland, the Vandergroot family says grace in Dutch. (Do third and fourth generation immigrants from any country pray in the mother tongue? No, they do not.) Nancy Vandergroot is seen once in church and it’s said her husband is a deacon. Apparently, they are religious. However, this is only mentioned and not explored. There is so much more that could have been done. And if you want to add a forbidden and scandalous nature to Dave Delgado and Nancy Vandergroot’s relationship, get them out of Holland High School and put them at Holland Christian. 

Instead of suspending disbelief, all I could think of was how fake the movie was. Some filming was done in Holland, but the majority was done in Nashville. The movie sort of looked like Holland, but not really. And consider the actors playing the Vandergroot family—these MichiDutch folks are portrayed by the Australian Kidman, the British Matthew Macfadyen (familiar to many from Succession), and the Irish Hill (who was terrific in Belfast but has much less asked of him here). None of them quite ring true. In the middle of the film, there’s a short trip made to Greenville. Since there is a joke made about Allegan, it seems like the producers are familiar with West Michigan geography, and there is a Greenville in West Michigan, not far from Grand Rapids. The Greenville in the movie has a high-rise hotel and seems to be a booming metropolis. In reality, Greenville, Michigan, is a town of about 8000 people. There’s a Meijer and a Walmart and a Dairy Queen. There aren’t any high- rise hotels. In fact, there are no motels or hotels of any kind. Why would there be? I’m left to conclude the filmmakers looked at a map and picked out a random place. Why wouldn’t they have chosen Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, places nearby that actually have large hotels? And don’t get me started on people ordering bitterballen for breakfast. What they were served looked like oliebollen. While you can find bitterballen in the Netherlands, and oliebollen also as a special treat on New Year’s Day, neither is for sale in the restaurants of Holland, Michigan. 

All these examples might seem picky and far from the question of whether the movie was actually entertaining. But details matter, and you build a great story by filling it with wonderful details and getting them right. 

I don’t know what genre Holland was supposed to be. Thriller? Drama? Dark Comedy? Horror? Mystery? It tries, at moments, to be all of the above but never rises to be any of them. I couldn’t help but wonder what this material might have been in the hands of someone able to sustain the bizarre and eerie, like M. Night Shyamalan, the Coen Brothers, or Jordan Peele. Still, I did enjoy the passing references to drinking “pop” and mentions of Zehnder’s in Frankenmuth and Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Yet getting details like these right made the details that were missed stand out more. 

There were signs this movie wasn’t going to be all it could be in the lead-up to its release. It skipped the theaters and went straight to streaming. The title was changed in the last few weeks. I really wanted Holland to be good. I had high hopes based on the star power of the cast. Sadly, those hopes weren’t realized. 

I’ve tried not to include any plot spoilers here, although I have to say the plot really doesn’t deserve that much respect. Squiggs Graumann isn’t the villain. Instead, the villain is the person from the first moments who is so outrageously too-good-to-be-true he has to be bad. Later in the movie, the villain kills a woman (who owns a lot of dogs), but no one notices or investigates the murder. The villain is also killed, but then he isn’t dead, and later, perhaps, he is finally killed. I think. It’s hard to be sure who is really dead. Or real for that matter. I kept waiting for Squiggs Graumann to show up and complicate the fight scenes, but he didn’t. In the end, I guess the moral of the story is when you witness a murder, you ought to call the police. Unless you don’t really exist, which the movie’s ending seems to hint at. (But then if you don’t exist, how is the gun you bring into things real?) Or maybe, as the movie also hints, the whole thing was a dream. Could be, which would make the movie’s dream sequences dreams within dreams, which is sort of trippy. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had a dream about having a dream. Those layers are sort like one of the main character’s toy train set and miniature recreation of Holland—a fake version of a city that’s also fake. There might be something interesting there, but alas, the film didn’t move me enough to care.