One of the 2025 Phoenix Film Festival's final centerpiece films was “Holland,” directed by Mimi Cave.

Set in Holland, Michigan—a town known for its Dutch heritage—the film follows the relationship between Nancy (Nicole Kidman) and Fred Vandergroot (Matthew Macfadyen). Nancy is an optimistic wife who lives in a small town where everybody knows each other and has what she thinks is a perfect husband.

However, Nancy notices that her husband, an optometrist, is taking an abnormal number of business trips, some for just a day and others for longer.

One night, you see Nancy making meatloaf. Once it’s finished, she puts a dollop of ketchup in the shape of a heart on the top. However, she loses track of how much ketchup she’s putting on, and next thing you know, the whole top layer of the meatloaf is covered in ketchup.

The ketchup symbolizes her annoyance with all of Fred’s work trips and the fact that she may be starting to break down due to the revelation that she suspects her husband may be having an affair.

Because of this, she enlists the help of her co-worker at Holland High School, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), with whom she starts to fall in love with, to investigate what Fred is up to.

Nancy and Delgado go through a lot to determine what Fred might be up to. They rummage through Fred's desk at his office and even follow him to a conference a few towns over.

Delgado even follows Fred after his conference to a cabin in the woods near a lake, where he sees Fred murder a woman. From there, Delgado and Fred fight, and you see Delgado accidentally stab Fred in the stomach. He falls over into the lake, presuming that he is dead.

While Delgado is investigating Fred, Nancy made some discoveries of her own. Through some Polaroid pictures, she figured out that they matched up with some of these tiny houses and street names on the family's model train set, indicating that it is a miniature replica of all the places in and around Holland where Fred has committed murder over the past many years.

It gets cheesy at this point in the movie because Nancy continues reassuring herself everything is alright, especially her son Harry. It's very apparent she's in denial.

In the end, Fred returns home to Holland and tries to make things right by getting Nancy to agree to put their past behind them and start anew, but she can’t bring herself to do so because she’s in love with Delgado.

On the drive home from the annual Tulip Festival Parade, she has Fred stop the car. At this point, we see Harry run out of the car, and immediately, Nancy and Fred get into a fight, with Nancy ultimately killing her husband with a clog.

This film is another reminder that not everybody is genuinely who they say they are, and you have to get to know someone if you want to discover their deepest secrets. The film also leaves the audience on a cliff-hanger. The audience never finds out if anyone got charged with Fred's murder or where Nancy, Harry and Delgado moved to. The audience can assume that they moved out of Holland because, with it being such a small town, a rumor of a murder would spread quickly.

The film was sold out, and many attendees enjoyed seeing the movie on the big screen. Laura Atwell came to the screening with her friend Laura Justice. Atwell said she’s been coming to the festival for 10 years now.

“I honestly go to all the night films in the festival because I think they're all good,” Atwell said. “So I didn't really particularly read the description and say, ‘Oh, I gotta see that.’ But it also helped, I think, that Nicole Kidman is in it, a name I recognize.”

Justice said this was her first time at the festival, and she was convinced to come because Atwell spoke so highly of it. She also agreed that having an actress like Nicole Kidman in the film was another reason for drawing her in.

Overall, this film was not suspenseful enough, had a predictable plotline, and left me with many questions. Nicole Kidman played the perfect wife and wasn't skeptical enough of her husband. In the end, I give this film a six out of ten.