When she read the script for “Holland,” Nicole Kidman must have seen a little of “To Die For,” the dark comedy that was her big break, the movie that set her up for Hollywood fame, Oscars and all that went with that.

There’s a frustrated woman stuck in small town “provincial” life who glimpses a way out of that trap via a younger man, and dark twists that suggest what people will do to achieve their short term aims.

Her character Nancy Vandergroot may be a lot less mercenary and a tad more “Stepford Wives” in her kitschy life in a “Groundhog Day” city that’s all about its corny Olde Country roots. The similarites are obvious and give this film’s abrupt shifts in tone and stakes some justification, even if director Mimi Cave (“Fresh”) and screenwriter Andrew Sodroski (TV’s “Manhunt”) are anything but subtle in trying to pull those off.

Nancy is a high school “Life Management” (Home Ec) teacher, mother of a spoiled, just-turned-13 son, wife of a popular optometrist (Matthew Macfadyen) and one of those cornerstones who make life and the mundane priorities of it work in her small city.

She’s all about the tulips, the local windmill tourist attraction, the native Dutch costumes and the festivals celebrating the Netherlanders who settled the Holland, Michigan, back in the day.

But Nancy married into all this — the Dutch maid costume with wooden shoes that comes out periodically, speaking Dutch with husband Fred at the dinner table, the Dutch reserve and Dutch “community,” the feeling that “I get to wake up in the best place on Earth,” she narrates.

And even if she realizes that “Fred rescued me” from whatever life she was leading before, even if she accepts how her husband teaches their son (Jude Hill) about “dealing” with women supposedly behind her back — Obsessive? Highly strung? “This is how women are.” — Nancy knows there’s got to be more to life than community pancake breakfasts and knowing the best place to get bitterballen in Holland, Michigan.

Her one confidante at school is the “new” shop teacher, Dave (Gale Garcia Bernal). But their friendship takes a turn when Nancy turns her hyper-focused attention on the latest “little mystery” she’s determined to “investigate.”

Fred takes an awful lot of weekend “junkets” for an optometrist. Credit cards she’s never seen, that parking ticket crumpled in his pants pocket to a town she’s sure he never mentioned visiting, that secret stash of Polaroid film she finds hidden in the vast model railroad complex he and son Harry are building in a workshop out back suggest Harry’s up to something.

With the usually-guarded Dave as her accomplice, Nancy starts sniffing around.

“Sometimes in life, you’ve just gotta follow the clues, no matter where they take you.”

As the mystery deepens, the woman determined to uncover her husband’s affair starts having one of her own.

The script takes an abrupt turn from light and kitschy to something darker, even as it throws fresh tropes at the wall to see what sticks.

The movie is set in the year 2000 and tries to wring humor out of the dated cell phones and limited nature of the Internet. Dave is Latino, and gets a taste of small town bigotry from a (probable) child-beating single parent. Nancy’s connection to the community doesn’t seem to include “real” friends, just cozy acquaintances with kids the same age, and she accepts the more helpful than fulfilling nature of the relationships that provides.

The cartoonish “investigation” stunts are straight out of 2477 earlier thrillers, and don’t offer anything that’s new or suspenseful or funny.

Kidman is committed and on pointe, as always, as are Macfadyen and Bernal. But their world is myopic (no outside characters of interest) and the situations they find themselves in are trite right up to the moment they aren’t.

The stakes are abruptly raised. “Darkly funny” settles into simply “dark,” much to the picture’s third act detriment.

A parade, a smattering of Dutch food and Dutch phrasing, a little dance demonstration and a tour of the windmill is all the “local color” the writer and director reach for, none of it connected to any sort of insights into this sort of town and the culture it clings to and the situation Nancy and Dave find themselves stumbling into.

It’s watchable and maintains just enough interest to get us to the end. But “Holland” never rises above featherweight, an incomplete “Dutch Treat” that is nothing “To Die For.”

Rating: R, sexual situations, violence, profanity

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen and Gael Garcia Bernal

Credits: Directed by Mimi Cave, scripted by
Andrew Sodroski. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:48