At the end of Nicole Kidman’s Holland, Mr. Darcy, sorry, her husband Fred, reveals a big truth about himself, but is any of it real? Nancy lives in the beautiful town of Holland, Michigan, and plays the perfect trad wife. But something is off. Nancy and Fred have a young son named Harry, and it just seems like the perfect family, with their cute little home, until one day, Nancy feels like something is really off. The film is a thriller set in the early 2000s, where Fred is an optometrist and Nancy is a good wife and teacher who looks after their kid and the meals. When she realizes that Fred’s work trips have become longer and more frequent, she starts to worry there’s something wrong. In a very Don’t Worry Darling way, Nancy finds herself questioning everything, and her surreal dreams show us her fear and confusion. Nancy gets close with a man named Dave, who is essentially her gossip buddy, and things suddenly change, and she begins investigating Fred’s trips. Soon enough, she realizes that Fred is cheating on her and decides to use Dave’s help to figure it all out. But is this the whole truth? Or is there more to the story?
Spoiler Alert
What Does The Missing Earring Signify?
I think the nanny character is a reflection of the world outside of Holland. The most obvious detail here is in her style and her clothes, which are very typically 2000s, but Nancy dresses like a Mormon wife who hasn’t been to the mall in 30 years. Maybe this is why, when Nancy loses her earring, she immediately blames the nanny that her son really likes. So, Nancy throws her out because they don’t need any contamination in the family. I think her losing her earring is the first sign of Nancy wanting to make her way out of Holland. Because it would breach the idea of living in a “perfect” world. Also, Nancy holding the single pearl earring is reminiscent of “Girl With The Pearl Earring,” one of the most famous paintings by Vermeer, one of the most celebrated Dutch artists of all time. The film begins with a radio show host announcing how Holland has a lot of “tulip” visitors. This is an important detail to remember for the rest of the film; I think it sums up the whole film right at the beginning. The nanny is a visitor, but Nancy and her family are permanent residents. But we’ll get into that in a bit.
What Do The Tulips Signify?
In Holland, the tulips play as important a role as they did in the 17th-century Netherlands. In the second half of the film, Nancy talks about feeling suffocated, almost like there’s something that’s keeping her tied down to the place and to Fred. This is likely the tulips, which are almost imprisoning the people of Holland and putting them in a dream-like state. A hallucinogenic, if you will. So, people who come in from outside, i.e., the nanny and Dave, probably have a little bit of a lower dosage of the stuff, making it just slightly easier to snap out of it. I suppose hanging out with Dave helps Nancy see that she doesn’t actually belong in Holland, making meatloaf and tending to her husband’s every need. It is the role she’s been given thanks to Fred, who she says at the beginning of the movie rescued her and brought her to Holland. So it’s possible that she put herself in this position. Maybe she signed up for a program or gave her consent to be indoctrinated (for lack of a better word) into the world of Holland. It’s possible that she didn’t know what she was getting into, and it’s been too long for her to remember; that’s why everything feels almost like a dream. So, yeah, I think the entire movie exists in a made-up world where everyone is neurologically wired to believe they’re happy and it’s the “best place in the world.”
What does Nancy’s choice of weapon signify?
Nancy learns that Fred is a serial killer, not a serial cheater, just as Dave goes after him because he wants definitive proof before he lets Nancy cheat. We’ll get to why Dave is so obsessed with this proof a bit later. Dave tells Nancy that he’s “taken care” of Fred by sending him away, but the truth is, he just let him fall into the water in front of the motel.
Later, Fred returns and uses Harry to lure Nancy out of the motel. He tells her that they just need to go home to make everything go back to normal. Then, when they’re in the car, she starts to freak out a little bit. She makes Fred stop the car and tells Harry to run, and somehow, the boy listens to her despite him being a daddy’s boy otherwise. It’s interesting because I think this means that Harry might be just Nancy’s son and not Fred’s? Anyway, Nancy pulls out Dave’s gun, and that is an important detail: the fact that the gun isn’t anybody else’s but Dave’s, because he’s an outsider (maybe that’s why we see a man be racist towards him; it speaks the fact that he’s an “outsider” in every sense of the word as the only minority in town). So, this gun actually works, and when it goes off, Fred’s left ear gets grazed (fun fact: famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh cut a bit of his left ear off for a lover). This gun wound looks real because the gun is very much real. Before he gets shot, Nancy tells Fred she doesn’t want him to put her in one of his little houses again. I don’t think there’s more reason to believe anything else after hearing that. Then, Nancy beats him up with a clog, which is a type of Dutch wooden shoe. This is what they were wearing to their little “non-sinful” dance. So, in the end, it is his own culture, or his own “Dutchness,” that leads to his demise, so to speak.
Why Was Fred Killing Those Women?
In the movie, it seems like Fred and Nancy are Calvinists, and the Calvinists believe that there’s such a thing as God’s elected—if a person is going to end up in heaven or hell is decided at birth, and whatever you do, it’ll never change. If you’re destined for heaven, your sins will be forgiven by God’s grace, and if you’re on the highway to hell, no display of virtue will save your soul. In both of these cases, Fred can justify what he’s doing by killing those women. What I noticed was that most of these women seemed to be less domestic than Nancy, something that would mean they’re already stepping away from the convention in Holland, maybe? This is why, to keep them in “check,” Fred was killing the women that had “turned.”
Why Did Dave Have A Gun?
Dave keeps mentioning his tryst with the police whenever Nancy asks him to do anything remotely illegal for her. This could mean that he’s run away and come to Holland for safety, or it could be a form of punishment, or it could simply mean he’s paranoid after his encounters with the law, which is why he has a gun. Dave is definitely “different” in more than one way within the framework of Holland, so that could also be why his gun isn’t a “toy” but the real deal.
What Do The Dogs Signify?
Maybe if someone counted, the number of dogs and the number of dead girls could possibly be the same. It would be going a bit too far to think that Fred was turning the girls into dogs, but this is more just a parallel, like the dogs get better treatment from Fred than the women do, and they clean up after him. The film does seem to have a feminist narrative too, of course. Fred tells his son Harry, “That’s how women are” after comparing handling them to smoothing out a comforter. One day it’s a big problem; the next day it’s all fine. Fred believes women are not complex; they just need to be controlled, and they’ll comply, and everything will be perfectly smooth, but I hate to break it to you buddy, that’s not how it works.
Why Does Harry Side With His Mum?
During Holland’s ending, we loop back to a scene that’s similar to the first part of the film; however, this time, instead of talking about Fred, Nancy talks about finding love with Dave and living a happy life together. The voiceover is then both of them, and they reflect on how they felt lost and couldn’t even trust themselves before finally meeting each other. But in the end, there’s still doubt in their voices, and they still fear that none of it was real. At the end of the film, we see little Nancy, Dave, and Harry dolls inside of the diorama set up that Fred was making throughout the film. Earlier, we realized that Fred was recreating the houses of his murder victims. This is why she says, “I don’t want to be in one of your little houses.”
In a dream Nancy has a little into the film, she sees Harry being pulled into a hedge in his Tulip Day costume, indicating her fear of losing him. The next time we see him in his Tulip Day costume, it almost feels like deja vu, because we see him turn around and look at his mother in the same way. Only this time it’s not a dream, and it’s Fred who she’s afraid will take Harry away. But what I find interesting is that Harry chooses to believe in his mum and not his dad when he sees the blood on her forehead at the end of the film. I guess he’s somewhat breaking the cycle and turning back to his mum, just like he did in the dream, because he believes her over his dad. Guess Harry knows what’s up, eh? Or, alternatively, he’s not real.
