Reel Rundown: Nicole Kidman’s suspicious ‘Holland’ character feels oddly familiar to her ‘Stepford Wives’ role

Everywhere we movie fans turn, we can’t seem to escape Nicole Kidman. Not only has the Oscar-winning actress (2003 for “The Hours”) participated in four movies over the past two years, she’s been part of four different miniseries as well.

And, of course, anyone who attends movies in an AMC theater is forced to see her ad singing the praises of that particular corporation before every feature film.

Talented as Kidman is, though, it’s impossible to appear in the number of films that she has over the years without repeating yourself. Her latest endeavor, the Amazon Prime streaming feature “Holland,” proves this.

That’s because her character, Nancy Vandergroot, feels like a reprise of the one she played in the 2004 remake of “The Stepford Wives.” At least it does in terms of the situation that the character finds herself facing.

Nancy is the wife of Fred Vandergroot (Matthew Macfadyen), an upstanding resident of the quaint, Dutch-themed city of Holland, Michigan. Both are parents of 13-year-old Harry (Jude Hill), whose care falls to Nancy.

She’s the chief caretaker because Fred is busy with his optometrist practice, which obligates him to attend out-of-town conferences, among other duties. Nancy, meanwhile, lives the “perfect” life of a traditional housewife, ferrying Harry to school, fixing nightly dinners and teaching home-economics classes.

But when she loses track of a pearl earring, Nancy sets off a chain of events that eventually involves her suspecting Fred of having an affair. And to investigate, she enlists the help of a fellow teacher, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal).

What they discover leads not only to something that neither expects but it awakens a pent-up sense of desire in Nancy herself.

At this point, “Holland” would seem to be a standard kind of film, one that follows a traditional the-character-awakens storyline. As it turns out, though, director Mimi Cave’s film, based on an original screenplay by Andrew Sodroski, is anything but standard.

Nor does it, in the end, make a whole lot of sense. Other than emphasizing the film’s “Stepford Wives” similarity, the use of the real Holland, Michigan, setting serves little purpose – cutesy tulip festival and all.

And while the three principal adult actors are all talented, the characters they embody have little or no obvious motivation to justify their actions. Each seems to have a history, but neither Cave nor Sodroski feel the need to explain what those respective histories might be.

Why is Nancy so suspicious? Why is Fred so willing to confront an abusive, racist parent but afraid to risk attracting the attention of the police? Yes, we do discover why Fred is so intent on creating a whole imaginary train-set world in his garage, but we get no reason to suggest why the teenage Harry would so quickly switch allegiance from one parent to the next.

And so on. Cave’s film devolves into a confusing mishmash of nightmare sequences, some violent (thus the obligatory R-rating) and most simply too silly or far-fetched to take seriously.

In her AMC speech, Kidman emphasizes that theaters with big screens offer an environment in which the stories being told “feel perfect and powerful.”

A lot of the time they do. Not while watching “Holland,” though – even on a small screen.