Holland (2025), another lousy Fargo clone

The other day I was watching Holland (2025) on Amazon Prime. Holland is not a prodigy of originality: it is another one of those Fargo clones that seem to be in fashion lately - like Greedy People or Maggie Moore(s), where stupid criminals usually unleash massacres of all kinds (unintentionally) in lost little towns in the United States, usually crammed with colorful characters - and never manage to stick the landing. Although Holland's town has no snow, it does take place in a community of Dutch immigrant descendants where everyone has a foreign surname. For example, Nicole Kidman's character - the protagonist - is named Nancy Vandergroot, she dresses up as a Dutch peasant girl for the annual cheese party, and there is even a windmill that is used as the community museum.

But the most fascinating thing about Holland is how extremely slow, clunky and undercooked the film is. I mean: Holland's script had been floating around Hollywood for years, and a 2013 survey by The Black List website ranked it as one of the best and most original scripts that had yet to be produced. That put it on par with other titles that also went through The Black List but did make it out of limbo, and which ended up spawning notable (and often Oscar-winning) films like Argo, American Hustle, Juno, The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, Spotlight, The Revenant, The Descendants, and Hell or High Water. But Holland doesn't even come close to the heels of such films. Was there a huge mistake in translating the script to the big screen, or are The Black List's ratings inflated by lobbyists who want to draw attention to certain projects so that major studios / streaming services will pay big bucks to acquire them?

In itself, the story is not complex. It's the 2000s. Bored wife stuck in a small town (Kidman) suspects her husband (Matthew Macfadyen) is having an affair. The man travels a lot - being a model railroader, he lives and visits model train shows, and has a massive model in the basement of his house (somewhat similar to the basement of Lex Luthor's mansion in Superman Returns, only without the zeppelins and skyscrapers) -. To confirm his suspicions he takes a co-worker (Gael Garcia Bernal) into his confidence, and soon the two begin plotting bizarre ways of how to get proof of the hoax. Bernal and Kidman are teachers at the same school, so they talk about it during breaks, at lunch and even meet after hours. Needless to say, the two amateur investigators soon begin to develop a mutual attraction, and the discoveries they make in their clumsy detective forays end up uncovering unexpected truths about the teacher's husband.

But the staging is awful, and for multiple reasons. This is nothing short of a Kidman vanity project, which means that the star's ego dominates the film's creative decisions rather than being in service of the story and what the director - in this case Mimi Cave, who made the bizarre but intriguing Fresh (2022), where Sebastian Stan seduced Daisy Edgar-Jones and the romance was going swimmingly until Stan revealed that he worked as a butcher, providing fresh supplies of human flesh to a group of cannibalistic millionaires (!) -. If Fresh was eccentric and quirky, here Cave is a hired gun to satisfy Kidman's artistic desires. While the casting of Matthew Macfadyen is unobjectionable - the English actor can be sophisticated, cynical, comic and sinister at the same time -, how they hired Gael Garcia Bernal is a mystery. Bernal next to the gargantuan Kidman (1.8 meters / 5' 10" tall) looks like Frodo, and there's a head's difference in height. Could it be that, because they are so disparate in height, they look comical?.

But the worst casting mistake is the star/producer herself in the lead role. Nicole Kidman has long looked like a wax museum sculpture, or that she looks like Michael Jackson's Australian sister. Her face looks plastic, her nose looks like a needle, her hands are so skinny they look like a corpse's and, when she gesticulates, her face wrinkles in unnatural places. Kidman is no longer a spring chicken but a 57-year-old grown woman, devastated by a mix of cosmetic surgeries and extreme diets that, from a distance, make her look like a teenager until you get up close and see that her face looks like a mask. To top it off, Kidman wears wigs all the time - that's vox populi in show business (even her Wikipedia page mentions it as a requirement of her contracts) and it shows -, so her look borders on the robotic. If your face is your working tool... why don't you accept your age, like Jamie Lee Curtis, and embrace the gray hair and wrinkles?. To top it all off, Kidman plays a middle-class village wife (not a millionaire addicted to surgeries, which would be more credible) in her forties - she has a 13-year-old son in the film! -, something that seems at odds with logic as soon as the Australian is on screen. It's something similar to what happened with Kidman in Babygirl, where she played the Milf / irresistible object of desire, but it was shocking when they made close-ups of her face.

The other problem is that Kidman has zero chemistry with Bernal, which is why it's not at all believable that these two would suddenly fall into a maelstrom of passion. And, considering the size difference, there are moments when she looks like a ventriloquist kissing her dummy.

But if the forbidden romance between Kidman and Bernal is incapable of setting the world on fire - besides being plagued by long, banal chats with zero humor and no sophistication -… what about the mystery plot that forms the core of the film? What does Macfadyen do in his spare time and when he disappears off the radar?

Incredibly the only silver bullet the film possesses - that the houses in the husband's model are more than just ornaments - is squandered by Mimi Cave's inability to handle the moment of revelation. It's original but not a marvel, and honestly, I think the whole story would work better as a half-hour episode of some Alfred Hitchcock Presents type mystery series. But stretching that story to 108 minutes, and with only three uninteresting characters occupying the screen the whole time (there's not even any exotic supporting characters to spice things up, something that is de rigueur in all Fargo clones - including seasons of the excellent series inspired by the Coen brothers' original -), is a bit excessive and indulgent with the aggravating factor that, when the climax arrives, things become so confusing and unbelievable that it turns straight into a disaster. This is one of those films where you're waiting for the story to pick up at some point, assuming it's slowly cooking up some spectacular moment or surprise... until you end up discovering that not only is that miracle not going to happen, but at the end you realize you've wasted 108 minutes of your life (that will never come back, an IMDB review cliché that applies in full force here) on an incompetent film that neither entertains nor surprises.

Want to see a great Fargo clone?. Better watch The Sticky. Snow, clumsy killers, exotic characters, ridiculous crimes... and lots of maple syrup. It's a thousand times better than Holland, too bad Amazon decided not to give it a chance and cancelled its second season, ending in a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Maybe it's because Amazon hates Canadian productions (considering the times we live in!), or because Jeff Bezos' signal favors big names on the billboard, even when they star in lousy movies like the one we're talking about now.

Other reviews from April 2025:

• The Good, the Bad, The Weird (2008), a spaghetti...eastern? - Underrated Comedies
• G20 (2025), Viola McClane vs. the terrorists - Fresh Film Focus
• Holland (2025), another lousy Fargo clone - Fresh Film Focus

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