Diksha Sundriyal
Prime Video’s mystery thriller, ‘Holland,’ stars Nicole Kidman as Nancy Vandergroot, a teacher in the eponymous midwestern town whose life spirals as she starts to suspect her husband, Fred, of infidelity. He is an optician and is a respected member of the community. They have been together for several years and have a son, Harry. While Fred is the calm and composed type who tries to settle the conflicts within the family peacefully, Nancy is introduced as a paranoid person who doesn’t take much to suspect people around her. At the beginning of the film, she suspects the babysitter of stealing her one earring, which later turns out to be in her button collection. This lays the ground for Nancy’s suspicions, which might seem ill-placed.
This is also why, for a minute, she thinks she might be wrong about her husband, but the sinking feeling about him hiding something never strays from her mind. Nancy’s string of suspicion begins with a parking ticket that she notices in her husband’s room. It was paid in a city that he never told her he visited. She also notices that the frequency with which he leaves for conferences has increased, and he often stays overnight in another town, sometimes stretching his trips for a couple of days. She starts to wonder if her husband is having an affair, and the only person she shares this concern with is her colleague, Dave. At first, he tries to dissuade her from investigating further, but he eventually gives in, mainly because he is attracted to her.
The more time Nancy and Dave spend together, the more they fall for each other, which makes them even more desperate to gather evidence against Fred’s infidelity. She finds Polaroid films in her husband’s possession, even though they don’t own a camera. She finds him buying weird things that don’t make any sense at first glance. However, by the end of the film, it turns out that Fred is up to something much worse than simply having affairs and random hookups with women during his many visits. This revelation shakes Nancy to the core, but it also raises some very important questions about her future, as well as that of her son. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Fred is the Serial Killer Behind the Missing Women
When it comes to finding evidence of Fred’s infidelity, Nancy decides to go to the source. If she finds the name of his mistress, the rest of the task will become much easier. After spying on Fred for a night, Nancy is on her way home when she realizes that the toy house that he had been building with Harry might hold the clue to her questions. Sure enough, she notices that one of the toy houses has the same identifying marker as a house that she saw in a Polaroid in Fred’s office. It says, “Lacy Anne, Queen of Bologna,” and this leads Nancy to a woman called Lacy Anne, whom she believes to be Fred’s mistress. However, when she calls to enquire about her, she discovers that Lacy has been dead for a while.
Slowly, Nancy uncovers other clues about Fred’s whereabouts and discovers that every time he visits those towns, a woman mysteriously goes missing. Later, her suspicions about him hurting those women are confirmed by Dave, who not only witnesses Fred in action but also has a confronting fight with him where he is almost killed. The fight ends with Dave stabbing Fred, who then falls into the lake. Believing the killer to be drowned, Dave runs for his life. He gets rid of the evidence that might connect him to Fred because he doesn’t know that Nancy has found out about it, too. If people learn about Fred’s death, they will automatically see Dave as the culprit because he is the outsider in the community, while the other guy is a highly respected member of it.
Nancy’s Fight For Survival
When Dave goes home, he believes that Fred is gone for good, but his worst fear comes to life on the day of the Tulip Time parade when the serial killer shows up again. By now, he knows that Dave and Nancy have been working together, which means that his wife knows everything. This allows him to drop pretenses, and he is not scared because he believes that Nancy has nowhere else to go, and hence, she cannot leave him. He acts as if nothing has changed and gets Harry and Nancy in the car with him so that they can go home, pack up stuff, go away, and start anew somewhere else. By this time, however, both Nancy and Harry are scared of him. While no one has directly told Harry about his father’s crimes, his fear shows that he may have an inkling of it.
For Nancy, it is more important to save her son, which is why she tells him to run as she points a gun at Fred. Realizing that she will not back down and things will never go back to being the way they were, Fred decides to kill her, too. The tussle leads to her shooting him in the face, but the wound is not fatal. He gets a hold of her and tries to choke her, but Harry intervenes and is thrown back. Eventually, Nancy gets a hold of her sandal and hits her husband with it until he has been subdued. The intensity with which she hits him with the pointed end of the footwear shows that she hurts him badly, but because we don’t see him breathing his last, there is a chance that he might simply be unconscious and not dead. In any case, the truth is out now, and with what happens next, it is clear that even if he survives, he will be spending the rest of his life in prison.
Holland Ending Explained: Is Dave Dead or Alive?
Before Dave moved to Holland, Michigan, he had had his fair share of trouble with the law. He was running from a shady past, which is why he didn’t want to get involved in something that might lead him to get arrested, which would be much easier for him than for Nancy. This is why, when he stabs Fred in self-defense and watches him fall into the lake, he is scared that the cops will find out about it, and he will be the one to go to prison. Worse, the murder of the woman in the cabin might also be pinned on him. This is why, when he comes back home, he doesn’t tell Nancy about what really happened. But his conscience continues to haunt him.
The image of the dogs lapping up the blood of their owner does not leave his mind. They haunt him in his sleep as well as his waking hours. He becomes scared enough to get his gun out because he worries that Fred might come back. And that is exactly what happens. Despite his advice to skip town immediately, Nancy wants to keep up appearances, at least until Tulip Time, so that no one wonders why she and Harry suddenly skipped town with Fred nowhere to be found. Then, her husband comes back, and Dave decides that things have gone too far and they must call the cops. While Fred may be the killer, he isn’t the only one whose life will be altered forever if he is arrested. Nancy knows that Harry will be the one to face the brunt of his father’s crimes. He will be known as a killer’s son, which will lead to bullying and all other sorts of problems for him.
She doesn’t want him to go through all that, so she tries to stop Dave from calling the cops. In the tussle, he slams against the wall, and a TV falls on his head. At first, it seems that he is fine, but then blood starts to flow from his head, which means that he needs immediate medical attention. He also starts to see the dogs all around him, which suggests that he has been hit harder than expected. Nancy decides to call for help, but when she notices that her son is missing, she is distracted. The rest of her time is spent searching for Harry and trying to escape Fred. When she returns, she finds Dave missing from the spot where she last left him, and the sound of the phone line suggests that he may have made a call. It is possible that when Nancy left him, Dave managed to get on his feet and witnessed the whole thing, with Nancy and Harry getting in the car with Fred.
This may have convinced him that either Nancy has decided to forgive Fred and will continue to be with him, or she is being held against her will, which means she will need help. In both cases, Dave has no option but to call the cops, and it seems that he might have done so. Seeing Fred in front of the house would also have triggered his fight or flight response, and he knows that once the killer is done with Nancy, he will come for him. So, Dave decides to make himself scarce. He runs away, though there is a good chance that he couldn’t have gotten far. Either he hid somewhere until the cops showed up, or he fell unconscious as he was already in a bad condition when Nancy left him to his own devices. As bleak as the situation looks for him, the ending suggests that he does not die and that he is most likely found and helped by the cops, allowing him to get back to his life.
What Does Dave and Nancy’s Overlapping Monologue Mean?
‘Holland’ begins with Nancy talking about how much she loves living in her Michigan town, how she was lost and scared before she met Fred and came here, and how perfect her life has been since. In the end, the entire story is flipped as she and Dave talk about what they thought Holland would be and how it eventually turned out. They talk about the fear and uncertainty of their lives before they came here and how lost they’d felt, how they thought that everything seemed perfect in the town, where they didn’t find escape until they met each other. They confess their feelings about how much they felt seen by one another, and Nancy even goes on to confess that it was after meeting Dave that she finally saw a way out of her marriage. This proves that the desire to find something about Fred, especially about his infidelity, was an excuse that she had been looking for to leave him.
The monologue also suggests that both of them are talking to the cops and telling them their side of the story. The fact that their words overlap so much points towards their shared experience or the possibility that they talked some stuff out before this interrogation. Surely, Dave would have spent some time in the hospital, recuperating from his head wound, before his statement was taken by the cops. One can also note a hint of pessimism in their voices when it comes to talking about one another. In the end, they both wonder if what happened was real at all or if it was all just a dream. They could be talking about the surreal nature of things, the intensity with which everything escalated, especially in terms of the revelations relating to Fred. At the same time, they might also be questioning their feelings for each other.
Dave might believe that Nancy used him to get herself out of Fred’s control. When they begin the affair, she clearly states that she cannot simply leave her husband, even though she suspects him of an affair. Later, she refuses to call the cops on Fred even though she knows that he has killed several women so far. On seeing her getting into a car with Fred, Dave might have interpreted it as her choosing her husband, making him question everything about her. Nancy, on the other hand, might question Dave’s feelings for herself because he called the cops when she expressly told him not to because she wanted to protect her son. This rift would be too much for both of them to bear and rebuild from, which means that the chances of them getting back together are pretty low. Their overlapping words suggest that they share the feeling of distrust and heartbreak, but it also means that they are both going their separate ways now.
Read More: Where Was Prime Video’s Holland Filmed?
