Nicole Kidman fans will be delighted to know Prime Video has today [Thursday, March 27] globally added her latest movie Holland.
It's hard to ignore the star. Over the past year, her output has been so prolific that she's become ubiquitous. Wherever you look, she’s there, be it in films such as her highly praised performance in the controversial age gap drama, Babygirl, or in Lulu.
Wang's mini-series Expats where she plays a mother reeling from a family tragedy while living in steamy Hong Kong.
The immediate future looks just as busy for the multi-award winner. While it's not officially confirmed yet, a third season of Big Little Lies seems to be on the cards. It all depends on author Liane Moriarty completing the sequel novel, which will provide the basis for the latest outing. The drip-feed of updates is more than enough indication that this is no mere rumour. All we need now is the official green light and a launch date.
And while Kidman has also been quoted as saying she’d love to be in The White Lotus and has several film and TV projects on the horizon, she's already got 2025 off to a more than promising start with her latest movie, Holland, which debuted at SXSW at the start of the month. Launching globally today on Prime Video, it sees her sticking to her promise to champion women directors. The film is the sophomore feature from Mimi Cave, who made such a strong impression with Sundance hit Fresh (2022) and sees Kidman returning to some familiar territory.
Kidman plays Nancy Vandergroot, a home economics teacher living in the picturesque Dutch-themed town of Holland in Michigan. She feels so safe with husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and their son Harry (Jude Hill) in its idyllic surroundings that she starts to wonder if it's actually real. But it takes just a small incident — the disappearance of a pearl earring — for everything to start unravelling and it's made even worse by fellow teacher Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) adoringly doing anything she asks. As things spiral out of control at a rate of knots, Nancy desperately tries to work out if the mystery she’s uncovered is actually true.
Suspecting Fred of having an affair, she embarks on one of her own, only to make a discovery that shakes her increasingly fragile world more than she could ever have imagined.
Kidman specializes in manic tension and brittle wit, a combination that’s perfectly suited to the tone and storyline of Holland. The humor is savagely dark, the mystery even darker, and it harks back to one of her earliest films, Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995), where she played a naïve TV celebrity who films a documentary about teenagers for her own motives. Her increasing twitchiness as her world appears to be crumbling has a wonderful foil in Macfadyen, a suburban dad so boring his Dull Men’s Club subscription would be on direct debit. But there’s more lurking beneath the surface: he constantly gaslights his wife and there’s something more than a little creepy about him.
Cave sets her sights very much on how the perfection of Holland’s exterior — immaculate houses, squeaky clean children with broad, toothy smiles — simply doesn't match what happens behind all those shiny front doors. But, as well as reminding us of To Die For, there’s an even stronger flavor of a film that’s always been associated with Kidman.
The 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives was an out-and-out comedy, in contrast to the creepy thriller with touches of satire from 1975. The humor is broader, with Kidman in caricature mode as a sharp-tongued career woman, accompanied by the more cartoonish Bette Midler as her slovenly best friend and Roger Bart as a waspish architect who, surprise, surprise, is turned into a gay Stepford Wife. While the narrative varies slightly from the original — the constantly beautiful and happy women of Stepford are carefully controlled cyborgs this time, rather than robots – the script is littered with razor-sharp one-liners are some hilarious visions of a male fantasy world, complete with motorbikes and flashy sports cars.
It’s a fun and worthy reboot, but Holland shows how far Kidman has come in just over twenty years, especially when it comes to brittle comedy/satire. She’s in a league of her own when it comes to that kind of role but as the past year has shown, she simply has a remarkable acting range. What she has in store for the rest of this year can only be exciting.
Holland is released globally on Amazon Prime on Thursday, March 27. The 2004 version of The Stepford Wives is available on Paramount Plus in both the US and UK.
The 1975 version of The Stepford Wives is unavailable for streaming in either the US or the UK.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
