It’s been three months since we saw Nicole Kidman starring in a film with Babygirl. You know what that means, right? Time for one of the most active actresses working today to grace the screen again — beyond the AMC commercial about cinema magic. She’s taken on so many characters over the years (and she always commits, taking each project seriously), but I can’t help playing a quick game of matching past performances to new ones.
Once again, Kidman plays an unfulfilled wife (Babygirl), who senses something is off (The Stepford Wives), but this time with her own slightly naughty agenda (To Die For). I like all these performances and elements individually, and mixing them with a kind of Jeanne Dielman-style life frustration makes for a great premise. But Holland never manages to bring it all together. The result is a protagonist who’s hard to root for — in a thriller where we should absolutely be on her side. It makes the whole “discovering what’s going on” stretch feel painfully slow, and by the time characters finally piece things together (in a twist that isn’t all that surprising), it’s too late — and the film doesn’t commit to doing much with it anyway.
There are small glimmers of a good thriller buried in there. Holland, Michigan is a great setting — there’s always something compelling about a mystery unfolding in a seemingly perfect small town. The lone-wife dynamic has promise too, and the central mystery is a solid foundation. Alex Somers’ score helps a lot — eerie, memorable, and setting a mood the film struggles to match elsewhere. I also really liked the use of miniatures.
But Mimi Cave’s direction ends up squandering most of the good ideas and wasting a great cast. It’s especially disappointing because Fresh was such a tight, effective debut. Here, she seems unsure of what movie she wants to make. And like Olivia Wilde in Don’t Worry Darling, she leans on inconsequential dream sequences that exist mostly for trailer-ready imagery and end up feeling totally irrelevant to the plot.
The tonal confusion is most obvious in how the actors are used. Rachel Sennott has literally one pointless scene. Nicole Kidman is fully committed to her character’s flaws, but the character shifts personalities from scene to scene with no clear arc. Jude Hill — so good in Belfast — barely registers here, and the script teasing that he might be following in his father’s footsteps (playing in the miniature setup) never goes anywhere. Gael García Bernal might be giving the most boring performance of his career. And Matthew Macfadyen has a role that feels tailor-made for him, yet the film gives him barely anything to work with. (Minor spoilers — skip the rest of the paragraph.) How do you cast Macfadyen as an unhinged husband who’s killed people, and then do absolutely nothing with it? He’s naturally unsettling, and the film still can’t manage a single good scene with him fully in that mode.
Not truly suspenseful, not particularly clever, and featuring one of the worst endings in recent years, Holland feels like multiple movies fighting for attention, none of them especially strong. It’s occasionally entertaining while you’re watching, but it leaves a sour taste once it’s done.