The opening title sequence of Holland features an eerie montage of images from the Dutch-themed local culture of the titular Michigan town. Little blond girls pose for portraits in wooden clogs and starched white bonnets while fields of pastel-colored tulips wave in the breeze. Nicole Kidman’s familiar voice, vowels flattened by a slight Midwestern accent, invites the viewer to appreciate “the best place on earth”—no longer, apparently, the AMC theater chain, but the aggressively folksy burg that is Holland. “Before I moved to Holland, I was afraid and confused and couldn’t trust anyone,” Kidman’s character, Nancy Vandergroot, adds in the same breathy, childlike whisper. What could she mean? Might it be that—as has only ever been the case with every movie set in picture-perfect suburbia since The Stepford Wives, including the Kidman-starring 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives—life in the tidy streets of Holland is not as quaint as it appears?

If there is evil afoot, the sheltered and credulous Nancy would be the last to know. She has subsumed her identity almost entirely into that of her husband, Fred (Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen), the town eye doctor. Though Nancy works part time as a home ec teacher at the elementary school, she devotes most of her day to creating a suffocatingly perfect home for Fred and their preteen son, Harry (Belfast’sJude Hill). The self-satisfied and condescending Fred benefits hugely from this arrangement, sailing in the door each night to a home-cooked dinner and taking frequent work trips that seem to hint at a double life. Nancy, suspicious that her husband is having an affair, enlists her friend Dave (Gael García Bernal), the school’s woodshop teacher, to help investigate the inconsistencies in Fred’s account of his comings and goings.

That overfamiliar setup—a brainwashed housewife slowly begins to wake up to the patriarchal dystopia her marriage has trapped her in—has been put in place less than 20 minutes in to this wildly overplotted yet ultimately nonsensical thriller. But the movie is more than two-thirds over by the time director Mimi Cave’s laborious establishment of the ironically perky mood resolves into anything as solid as a plot twist. That is, if “twist” is even the word for the new information that’s revealed over the course of several scenes, most of it guessable from what’s gone before and the rest so cryptic that even after many rewinds, I am hard-pressed to answer such basic plot questions as “What happened to that one major character who disappeared without a trace?,” “Is that other major character somehow supernaturally controlling events in the story, or are they just a big jerk?,” and every head-scratching viewer’s favorite, “Wait, was it all just a dream?”—closely followed by such corollary queries as “That’s it?” and “Are you kidding me?”

Since we’re throwing out questions: Does anyone really care if this review spoils Holland? If you do, now is your chance to bail out, because the only meaningful analysis I have of this wan Prime Video offering has to do with its inexplicably slapdash plotting. Why is an early subplot set up around the firing of the Vandergroots’ babysitter (Rachel Sennott of Bottoms and Bodies Bodies Bodies) and then never revisited again? Why is Sennott’s character, a vaguely grunge type in flannel shirts and black nail polish, seemingly the only woman in town who’s immune to whatever has the rest of the town’s female population obediently baking meatloaf and throwing quilting bees?

Leaving aside that abandoned story thread, let’s get to the bigger stuff. In the first of several horror-tinged dream sequences, Nancy finds herself wandering through an uncannily empty Holland that slowly shrinks into a version of her husband and son’s electric train set (an image that harks back to 1988’s Beetlejuice). That train set and its surrounding miniature village recur in the story when the big revelation comes along: Fred’s ostensible business trips have been covers for his real secret, that he’s a serial murderer of women from nearby towns. During Nancy’s interminable quest to unravel this mystery, it’s suggested that Fred’s killing sprees are tied up with his elaborate building plans for the toy village—indeed, he seems to be creating minuscule copies of the home of each woman he kills, an intriguingly creepy premise that, like Nancy’s paranoid dismissal of the babysitter, is never returned to. One exchange between Fred and his son as they work on the train set even suggests that Fred may somehow be controlling the whole town of Holland via the choices he makes for the scaled-down model in his basement. Or is that impression only a reflection of Nancy’s paranoia? But how could that be the case when Nancy is not present to witness this father-son conversation?

In the movie’s third act, once the reveal about Fred’s murderous propensities should have cleared up some of this murkiness, the confusion only grows. Why is García Bernal’s Dave, whose crush on Nancy keeps driving him to make more and more dangerous choices on her behalf, also having dreams that suggest Fred is somehow controlling either Dave’s mind or, again, the mass psyche of the entire town? Why do those dreams so often involve packs of menacing Pomeranians? The unfortunate Dave, a lonely Mexican immigrant in a lily-white town, is the character who suffers most at the hands of Andrew Sodroski’s incoherent script. After risking everything to come to the aid of the feckless Nancy—who, the viewer can’t help but think as the two put themselves in legal and then physical danger to catch Fred in the act, could have simply left her husband at any time—Dave finds himself abandoned both by Nancy and by the film itself. Our last glimpse of him, bleeding from a head injury on the floor of the getaway house Nancy has escaped to with her son, suggests that Dave may have given his life to defend her—but when she returns to the house later to look for him, he is nowhere in sight, and except in a final dream sequence–like montage, we never see him again.

It’s this coda that’s the most maddening part of Holland. Over a montage of more eerie Dutch imagery—the town’s windmill tourist attraction, Nancy smiling in one of those white lace bonnets, Fred’s beloved Holland-themed train set—we hear a dual voice-over in which Nancy’s and Dave’s words overlap, as if they were the same person all along. Echoing Nancy’s still-unexplained reference in the opening titles to a dark past in her pre-Holland days, the two of them express gratitude for having found both each other and, in Nancy’s words, “a way out.” As a tiny train disappears down a dark tunnel, we hear their two voices in unison as they deliver the teeth-grindingly annoying final line: “Sometimes I wonder, was it even real?”

The sloppy vagueness of that final twist is an insult to the viewer, given the size of the plot questions that remain unanswered as the movie draws to a close. Is Fred, in fact, something more supernaturally ominous than your everyday mortal serial killer? If not, how does he survive two seemingly successful attempts to kill him before the third one (I think) finally does? (The director and cast have demurred when asked about most of the movie’s ambiguities, though Cave has stated that, at least in her interpretation, Fred does finally die.) Was Dave merely a figment of Nancy’s imagination all along? If he was, why and how did the audience witness that figment interacting with other characters in scenes where Nancy is not even present? If Dave is a real person and not a figment, what happened to him in that getaway house? Is it too much to ask that we get some clarity on whether one of the three major characters in a schlocky thriller, first, truly exists and, second, if real, is dead or alive by the time the final credits roll?

As a straight-to-streaming feature with big-name stars that’s barely been promoted by its own studio—Amazon declined to provide critics with screeners, and searching for the movie on Amazon the day it dropped, I had to type the title all the way down to the D—Holland exemplifies a depressing trend in the current entertainment industry. It appears to be relying on name recognition to garner an initial burst of curious viewers before word gets out about what a dud it is. Holland’s script had been kicking around Hollywood for nearly a decade before being picked up by Kidman’s production company. It should have kept on kicking.