SXSW film festival: Fresh director Mimi Cave delivers an underwhelming follow-up that can’t make the most of its hard-working leading star

Nicole Kidman is, in general, providing a public service with her seemingly inexhaustible energy. She’s been working consistently with female directors – 19 in the last eight years – while also attempting to rescue the tight domestic thrillers of yore and consistently probing the gap between women’s placid public facades and private turmoil. The quality of Kidman’s performances – and she is almost always delivering something a little weird, a little off and very magnetic – does not indicate the quality of the project, which can range from the provocative (if underwhelming) Babygirl to her personal beach-read cinematic universe of mediocre TV roles.

Holland, Kidman’s latest film as a star and producer (under her Blossom Films banner), finds Kidman in a familiar groove: a suburban housewife with secrets and suspicions, beset by paranoia and straining to keep up appearances. Like many a Kidman character before her, Nancy Vandergroot projects perfection – china-doll smile, coiffed hair, nuclear family dinners – and nurses big feelings about the small stakes of her fishbowl environ. The trailer, released ahead of the SXSW film festival by distributor Amazon Prime Video, promises a Kidman performance in the lane of The Stepford Wives – eerie, brittle and unnerving, with the added weirdness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic lakeside town locally famous for its annual tulip festival. In practice, it squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing.