by admin | Mar 30, 2025 | Articles, Moviephone Articles
Nicole Kidman stars in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
‘Holland’ receives 5.5 out of 10 stars.
Premiering on Prime Video on March 27th, ‘Holland’ is proof that even a potentially compelling concept and a decent cast can be squandered if the movie utilizing them doesn’t commit fully.
It’s a shame, as director Mimi Cave has made impressive work before. Here, though she seems to have lost her way with a meandering tale of suburban secrets.
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Does ‘Holland’s tale of tulips bloom?
Matthew Macfadyen stars in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
It’s a rule that if your community and relationship in a thriller is apparently perfect on the surface, there must be dark secrets lurking beneath. After all, who really wants to sit through a story where it’s all apple pie and happy families?
Yet we’ve seen the story of suburban secrets so many times on screens both big and small that a movie really has to have something fresh to say about it. Unfortunately, even though Cave delivered with her previous movie, the cannibalistic comedy ‘Fresh,’ there’s not much of that spirit here.
In fact, there’s not much of any spirit. A movie riven by a split in its personality, the first half is a funny and sometimes entertaining look at a town and a relationship seemingly lost in time –– it’s set in the year 2000, but could be the 1960s for all its folksy traditionalism. The second half pulls the trigger on the thriller element as Nicole Kidman’s Nancy starts to learn the truth of who she’s married to, but even then the movie wants to keep up the jokier elements and the two tones really aren’t merged successfully.
Script and Direction
(L to R) Nicole Kidman and Gael Garcia Bernal stars in ‘Holland’. Photo: Jaclyn Martinez. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Writer Andrew Sodroski has experience more in TV, creating a season of ‘Manhunt’ based around the Unabomber. His movie credits are mostly limited to a couple of crime thrillers. The problem with his scripting for ‘Holland’ is that it feels aimless –– for a movie whose main characters are a life skills teacher who prides herself on her cooking, the storyline is underbaked, and the other an optometrist, it’s noticeable how unfocused the characterization turns out.
It’s also an issue that the use of model train sets as metaphor for the control that one character has over another is so heavily employed as to approach parody. It’s one thing to employ a metaphor; quite another to beat it into the ground.
Cave does her best to bring some style to the proceedings; a dream sequence where Nancy imagines strange images such as her neighbors becoming mannequins and a flood sweeping through the town’s main street are effective, but the rest of the movie never achieves the same level of creepiness.
There are missed opportunities here and sadly, the movie fails to really coalesce.
Cast and Performances
(L to R) Matthew Macfadyen and Nicole Kidman star in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Nicole Kidman has spent the last few years mostly playing icy matriarchs, entitled wealthy housewives or driven businesswomen and if there’s an advantage to ‘Holland,’ it’s that she is able to once more tap into a kookier, sweeter character, albeit one who is not afraid to fight back when it counts.
She’s typically impressive, but the character doesn’t always offer her everything she needs, and it’s ultimately nowhere near as memorable as some of her other work.
Matthew Macfadyen, meanwhile, leans into the twin sides of Nancy’s husband Vandergroot –– at once the nerdy, seemingly sweet local ophthalmologist who brought her from a dead-end small town existence to this seemingly perfect existence and someone who is going to great lengths to conceal things (even if he leaves giant clues in his model train set up, a seemingly silly idea for someone with so much to hide).
He’s perfectly fine in the role, creepy when required and forever telling Nancy to just ignore what she’s worried about. But once the truth is revealed, the character becomes far more one-note.
Gael Garcia Bernal stars in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
Gael García Bernal plays Dave Delgado, Nancy’s closest confidante at the school where they both work, and a man who would like their relationship to be more. Bernal brings some solid shades to the character, and has a good arc.
Elsewhere, there is some truly wasted talent on display. Though he certainly has a couple of decent scenes to show what he can do, young Jude Hill (who broke out in Ken Branagh’s ‘Belfast’) is here reduced to minor moments as the couple’s son, Harry.
Ditto Rachel Sennott, so good in the likes of ‘Shiva Baby’ and ‘Bottoms’ has exactly one tiny scene at the start of the movie to show what she can do, but it wasn’t even worth her showing up.
The other townsfolk are mostly limited to plot devices rather than actual humans, but the likes of Lennon Parham, Jeff Pope and Chris Witaske do what they can with tiny roles.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Jude Hill and Nicole Kidman star in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video. Copyright: © Amazon Content Services LLC.
‘Holland’ certainly has ideas on its mind, but sadly those ideas have been explored more effectively before. There’s not enough style or story here to really make it worth your while.
“Some things only look perfect.”
What is the plot of ‘Holland’?
A teacher (Nicole Kidman) in a small midwestern town suspects her husband (Matthew Macfadyen) of living a double life, but things may be worse than she initially imagined.
Who is in the cast of ‘Holland’?
- Nicole Kidman as Nancy Vandergroot
- Gael García Bernal as Dave Delgado
- Matthew Macfadyen as Fred Vandergroot
- Jude Hill as Harry Vandergroot
- Jeff Pope as Squiggs Graumann
- Isaac Krasner as Shawn Graumann
- Lennon Parham as Gwen
- Rachel Sennott as Candy Deboer
- Jacob Moran as Matt
Nicole Kidman stars in ‘Holland’. Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video © Amazon Content Services LLC.
List of Mimi Cave Movies:
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by admin | Mar 29, 2025 | Articles, Moviephone Articles
Okwui Okpokwasili as the Woman in ‘The Woman in the Yard’, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Photo: Universal Pictures.
‘The Woman in the Yard’ receives 5.5 out of 10 stars.
Opening in theaters on March 28th is ‘The Woman in the Yard,’ directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and starring Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson, and Estella Kahiha.
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Initial Thoughts
Okwui Okpokwasili as the Woman in ‘The Woman in the Yard’, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Photo: Universal Pictures.
‘The Woman in the Yard’ was held back from critics until literally the night it started playing in theaters, which is usually a sign that a film is so bad that the movie studio doesn’t want any reviews going up before its release that could dampen the box office. Sometimes the studio’s fear is warranted, but at other times the reticence is baffling.
The new horror film from Blumhouse and Universal, ‘The Woman in the Yard,’ falls somewhere in between: this is a handsomely mounted and often beautifully shot movie from director Jaume Collet-Serra, whose recent output has included both a fun if silly action flick (‘Carry-On’) and a turgid superhero dud (‘Black Adam’). Collet-Serra’s early films were horror titles, including the bonkers ‘Orphan,’ and here he wrings some decidedly chilly atmosphere from the initial premise and good performances by a cast led by Danielle Deadwyler (‘The Piano Lesson’). But ‘The Woman in the Yard’ rapidly falls apart in its second half, losing coherence and sense while also trying to tell a story about sorrow and crisis. In trying to go for both genre shocks and emotional depth, it succeeds at neither.
Story and Direction
(L to R) Director Jaume Collet-Serra and Danielle Deadwyler on the set of ‘The Woman in the Yard’. Photo: Universal Pictures.
Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) is deep in the throes of grief, guilt, and depression following the death of her husband David (Russell Hornsby, seen in flashbacks) in a car accident that also left Ramona on crutches with a broken leg. The rural farmhouse she and David bought is falling into disrepair; Ramona hasn’t paid the electric bill so the power is out, and her teen son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) has to fire up the stove with a lighter to cook breakfast (eggs and Doritos) for his little sister Annie (Estella Kahiha) before what little food they have spoils.
Things take a darker turn when a woman (Okwui Okpokwasili), wearing a black veil and shroud-like garments, inexplicably shows up seated in a chair in their front yard. When Ramona goes outside to ask who she is, the woman replies with a question of her own: “How did I get here?” she asks dazedly. Although she refuses to identify herself or lift her veil at first, she eventually has an ominous warning for Ramona: “Today is the day,” she intones. “You called and I came.”
Tensions within the house rise as the woman seemingly draws closer, while the family dog goes missing and the inhabitants of their little chicken coop meet a grisly fate. Taylor wants to confront the woman himself, or short of that, drive to a neighbor’s house, but the car won’t start. (Why people in horror films often think that buying an isolated house with no one else around is a good idea, especially when they have kids who would maybe like to play with other local kids, always baffles us.) And then the woman gets even closer and the house itself comes under siege from her spectral presence.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra on the set of ‘The Woman in the Yard’. Photo: Universal Pictures.
Collet-Serra gets his best material out of the opening scenes of the movie, aided by strong performances from Deadwyler and the kids as a family falling apart at the seams. There’s a thick layer of dread in the air once the woman appears, and her dark presence against the bright sky and vast field outside the house is both jarring and surreal, reminiscent of similar tableaux in films like ‘The Innocents’ and ‘Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.’
But this isn’t enough material to sustain even this movie’s relatively brief (88 minutes with credits) running time. What might work on paper as a ghostly short story gets stretched to the breaking point in the second half, with Collet-Serra deploying a number of standard shocks as the script comes completely unglued. What exactly is happening? It seems pretty clear that the woman is either a supernatural or psychological manifestation of Ramona’s anguished state of mind. But if this is all psychological, then why can the kids see the woman? Why does poltergeist activity start occurring in the house?
It eventually comes around – sort of – to some revelations that lay out what might be really happening, but even though Collet-Serra and Stefanak reach for some profundity, the film has become too confused with what’s real and what isn’t to make the impact they’re aiming for. Horror doesn’t always have to be explained or knowable – that’s often what makes it frightening – but there does have to be some internal logic. ‘The Woman in the Yard’ dispenses with that. Some might call the film ambiguous; we’ll just call it incoherent.
Cast and Performances
(L to R) Taylor (Peyton Jackson), Annie (Estella Kahiha) and Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) in ‘The Woman in the Yard’, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Photo: Universal Pictures.
As with many horror movies made for a price these days, there are just five actors in ‘The Woman in the Yard.’ We never see anyone else or even get a sense of where this family is living. We know that Ramona is an artist who has stopped painting out of grief, but as is often the case in modern horror movies, where everything stems out of trauma, she is solely defined by her pain. Danielle Deadwyler does as good a job as she can with such thin character development, making the depths of her sadness and grief palpable and intense, even through her physicality; but that’s the whole of her being. There’s one scene later on that adds a new wrinkle to what she’s going through, but it too lands as more confusing than anything else.
Peyton Jackson and Estella Kihara are also quite good as the kids, the latter cute as a button and painfully sympathetic as she’s caught in the crossfire between her headstrong brother and short-fused mom. Jackson effectively catches the conflict in Taylor between being a rebellious teen and wanting to step up as the man of the house. And then there’s Okwui Okpokwasili as the woman, a strangely conceived role that she manages to infuse with some gravitas and existential menace before the story turns her into a more standard monster.
Final Thoughts
Danielle Deadwyler as Ramona in ‘The Woman in the Yard’, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Photo: Universal Pictures.
As we stated earlier, ‘The Woman in the Yard’ does benefit from some of the early style that Collet-Serra gives it, supported by the cast, Lorne Balfe’s stirring score, and some lovely cinematography from Pawel Pogorzelski. It’s a nice switch to see a horror film unfold in bright sunlight (although this movie eventually goes dark too) with some striking imagery. But the movie’s rather languid pace and reliance on atmosphere and psychological pressure is at odds with the rapid-fire, mish-mash editing and shock-horror jolts of the film’s third act.
It almost feels like ‘The Woman in the Yard’ is fighting with itself and losing its grip as it tries to extend this material into a feature-length story. By the time it was over, as compelling as it starts out, we were ready to get outside ourselves.
What is the plot of ‘The Woman in the Yard’?
A grieving, deeply depressed widow (Danielle Deadwyler) and her two children (Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) wake up one morning in their isolated farmhouse to discover a mysterious veiled woman dressed in black shrouds sitting in their front yard and issuing a warning: “Today is the day.”
Who is in the cast of ‘The Woman in the Yard’?
- Danielle Deadwyler as Ramona
- Okwui Okpokwasili as The Woman
- Russell Hornsby as David
- Peyton Jackson as Taylor
- Estella Kahiha as Annie
‘The Woman in the Yard’ opens in theaters on March 28th.
List of Jaume Collet-Serra Movies and TV Shows:
Buy Tickets: ‘The Woman in the Yard’ Movie Showtimes
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