You’ve already seen this Nicole Kidman movie. She’s a housewife and loving mother. She cooks dinner every night and looks gorgeous doing it. But there’s something wrong with her seemingly comfortable life, whether it be scheming spouses, a sudden tragedy, or — in the case of The Stepford Wives — a town that wants to turn her into a robot tradwife. Despite the white picket fences and the picture-perfect nuclear family, there’s an inner turmoil that betrays the shiny veneer of all-American suburbia. She always feels one thing: suffocated.
The deviation from the formula in Mimi Cave’s disappointing second feature is that Kidman’s Nancy Vandergroot lives in Holland. No, not that one — this is Holland, Michigan, an uncanny facsimile of the idyllic town’s Dutch counterpart, complete with a towering windmill and an annual tulip festival. Cave’s debut Fresh cleverly saw Sebastian Stan’s charming charisma mask a penchant for cannibalism, which would seem to suggest that Holland will uncover a similarly seedy underbelly. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, an Ari Aster regular, captures the town with storybook-like vibrancy, but the unconventional location functions as little more than kitschy window-dressing, one that could be swapped out for any other small-minded midwestern town.
There’s an unavoidable feeling that everyone involved has been here before.
Andrew Sodroski’s meandering script equally fails to live up to that promise of something stranger. When Nancy begins to question her husband Fred’s (Matthew Macfadyen, still in Tom Wambsgans mode) frequent out-of-town work trips, she launches an amateur investigation into his potential infidelity. Joining her is Dave, played by a criminally underused Gael García Bernal in a role that allows the film to barely graze the reality of being the only person of colour in an all-white town. If this sounds like a straightforward thriller straight from an airport novel, you’re not far off, even as Nancy eventually discovers Fred’s secret.
The bonnets and clogs of Holland, Michigan work as a shorthand for unnerving conformity that Kidman gamely plays up to. In the film’s opening scene, she stares down the lens with a vacant grin, like a pristine doll robbed of autonomy. But in her latest role in a storied lineage of disgruntled wives, Kidman is in cruise control, delivering a performance that’s as reliably transfixing as she always is, but not quite peak Kidman. The daring conviction of Babygirl is a tough act to follow, and the star is hardly flexing any new muscles through Nancy’s descent into paranoia. Cave’s film admirably strives for something original, but there’s an unavoidable feeling that everyone involved has been here before.