Nancy minus the Drew vibe

When a film is titled ‘Holland’ and set in a place filled with Dutch-Americans, tulips and windmills, and all establishments are named after it (Holland Optometry, Holland High School and so on), one expects the town to be as much a character as the rest of the cast. At least, it must play a meaningful role in the narrative. But, in Mimi Cave’s ‘Holland’, this Dutch town in Michigan, USA, remains just a picturesque background. Nothing more, nothing less.

In this serene idyllic town, we meet Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman), who teaches home economics and educates youngsters on how to make Dutch baby pancakes. But it’s not the career graph of Nancy that we need to focus on. Like too many other elements in the film, this bit of information does not go beyond a single class. Only, this is the place where she meets her future ally Dave Delgado (Gael Garcia Bernal), the mysterious new man in town.

For a long period that spans over 80 minutes, the camera captures Nancy the paranoid wife, who fires a babysitter over a lost earring, and suspicious about her optometrist husband Fred’s (Matthew Macfadyen) frequent out-of-town trips, snoops around looking for clues, a la Nancy Drew.

Dave and Nancy soon get into a romantic relationship and her concerned ‘wifely’ suspicion turns into a mission — to find evidence of Fred’s infidelity that would help her gain custody of their only son, Harry (Jude Hill), once she leaves Fred.

Not a nice character to know, but Nancy has to do what she has been assigned to do — make people laugh with her silly antics of an amateur detective. Nicole Kidman, with her blonde curls and upturned nose, is a delight to watch as she gets into the skin of the character that belongs to the early 2000s, the days of pagers and Nokia phones. Bernal as the brooding man who is in love with Kidman’s character and Macfadyen as the man with a dark side ably support her, even as the plot lets them down.

The screenplay meanders aimlessly to portray Fred’s credentials as a respectable citizen and family man who loves to play with his son, Nancy as someone who wants some extra thrill outside marriage and Dave, whose mysterious past remains a mystery. All we know about him is that he keeps a gun buried in his backyard. There is no scope to feel for the characters or the situations. Even when a racial crime is committed against Dave, or worst of all, when Nancy finally stumbles upon the truth about her husband.

In fact, when the twist in the tale is revealed and Fred desperately asks for a ‘reset’ in their relationship as despite his dark side, he tries to safely extricate Nancy and their son from the ‘mess’ he has created. This, perhaps, is the only emotional moment in the entire film that stands out.

Contrasting a serene setting with the twisted human mind could have been a splendid idea for a murder mystery, but Cave miscalculated when she dwelled too much on Nancy’s gut feeling that something was wrong when it came to her husband and landed straight into a full-blown climax. The sense of continuity gets lost.

Even the climax comes like a series of hurriedly executed baffling developments. Nancy putting two and two together with the help of missing women’s reports and, simultaneously, Dave catching Fred in the act, an accident and the reappearance of the villain happen so quickly and so predictably that there is no room for any tension building.

Even the few scenes that are supposed to heighten suspense end up as a distraction in this murder mystery with loose ends.

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