‘Fjord’ Review: Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve Are Religious Parents Accused of Child Abuse in Cristian Mungiu’s Gripping Culture War Drama

The Romanian director of "R.M.N." journeys to Norway for a cautionary tale about cultural assimilation.

Intolerance assumes a more progressive sheen with Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” a characteristically fraught and tangled drama in which the “R.M.N.” filmmaker continues to vivisect the reactionary pitfalls of globalization — this time in Norway, which the annual World Happiness Report consistently lists as one of the happiest countries in the world. 

Perhaps that explains why Romanian software engineer Mihai Gheorghiu (a bald Sebastian Stan, looking more like Damon Lindelof than the Winter Soldier) was so quick to move his brood from the middle of Bucharest to a scenic fjord in Stranda after his parents died; Mihai’s wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve, her performance like a shaken willow) was raised in the area, and her mother is supposedly still around to help care for the couple’s five kids. The religiously conservative Gheorghius might not mesh right away with the ultra-liberal utopianism of their new home, but Jesus didn’t have a problem with good schools and excellent healthcare. He said “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and for the most part the Gheorghius appear to live by that credo as they settle into a secular community by the sea.

Their woke and godless neighbors — who own televisions and don’t know how to discipline their kids — are a different story. They try to be nice about it, of course, as seeming unkind is among the worst of liberal sins, but the schoolmaster (Markus Scarth Tønseth) who lives nearby looks ever-so-slightly askance at the strict point system that Mihai applies to his children (don’t ask), or his choice to punish the older two by refusing to let them attend a birthday party they can hear from their bedroom window. Never mind that Mats’ teenage daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) is a troubled soul who steals the family boat every night and slashes her wrists to get a rise out of her friends, it’s the well-mannered Catholics next door who are doing things backwards. 

And in some ways, I’d argue, they are. I suspect the majority of Mungiu’s audience shares my disgust with Mihai’s belief that gay marriage is an affront to heaven. By the same token, I belong to a generation of American parents who would cut off their own hands if they ever laid them upon their kids (Mihai admits to slapping a butt or two back in the day), and I’m sure I’d judge someone for not letting their children listen to secular music even though I’d happily pay all the money on Earth for the chance to go back in time and stop my six-year-old from hearing that Ice Spice song from the latest Spongebob movie. 

Be that as it may, it’s hard not to have some major reservations when the Norwegian Child Welfare Service determines that the small bruises a teacher finds on Mihai and Lisbet’s eldest daughter (Vanessa Ceban as Elia) are reason enough to take all five of their kids into custody while they conduct a thorough investigation. Mungiu’s penchant for soul-scorching sequence shots is at a minimum in this movie, and his visual approach only grows more formally restrained as its story builds towards the stuff of a familiar courtroom drama, but the uninterrupted scene where government workers come into Lisbet’s home and tell her they’ll be leaving with all of Lisbet’s children — including the new baby who still breastfeeds! — is as stomach-churning as anything in the director’s body of work. “We’re here to help,” they say. “We have to look out for the best interests of the children,” they say. In truth, it feels more like a state-funded abduction. It feels like the kind of thing that should inspire any good liberal to take to the streets.

And so, under the gray-periwinkle skies of a perfect Norwegian winter, the Gheorghius find themselves punished for their failure to assimilate into the values of a country that most of them have never lived in before. Whereas earlier in his career Mungiu may have entertained the possibility that Mihai actually is a violent monster at heart (a possibility that would have been fueled by the festering rage of Stan’s rigorous and restrained tri-lingual performance), here the filmmaker is content to prize ambivalence over ambiguity; the very first scene of the movie might demand a second look, but I tend to believe that “Fjord” gives us all the evidence we need to know that the Romanian transplants are getting railroaded. 

If that sounds like the recipe for a faith-based persecution drama (or so much worse: an 146-minute dose of Bill Maher-like sermonizing against the messily applied impulse to make the world a better place), rest assured that Mungiu is much less interested in defending biblical values than he is in interrogating the nuclear friction at the root of even the “nicest” culture clash. It’s a bit convenient that the Gheorghius’ kids are compliant little angels while Mats’ daughter is the closest thing their town has to a certified hellion, but the fact remains that Mihai and Lisbet are being persecuted for their differences in a society that prides itself on its freedoms. It’s even suggested that the children’s testimony — the most damning evidence the state has against their father — might be the result of a language-related miscommunication.  

The Gheorghius are the victims of good intentions, which is of little comfort to them as the seasons change and they continue to be separated from their kids. A slow-burn snowball that achieves much — or at least some — of Mungiu’s signature entropy despite eschewing the more overt bigotries that fueled his previous films, “Fjord” digs its heels deeper and deeper into the situation as Mihai and Lisbet do their best to cooperate with the investigation. 

Lisbet’s relationship with Mats’ ailing father offers a curious inversion of the movie’s cultural mores (Lisbet, a caretaker at the local nursing facility, resists the old man’s request to die with dignity), while Mihai is compelled to amplify — and possibly even exaggerate — his hardline ideology in order to whip up viral support from conservative protestors across Europe. Extremism begets extremism, as tends to be the case in Mungiu’s work, and while the eventual court battle lacks the same intensity that allows “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” and “Beyond the Hills” to grip you in a chokehold, “Fjord” gradually distills its own sense of urgency from the deprivations that it fosters among its children. Among all of its children. 

“You need to learn to apologize when you’re wrong,” Mihai instructs his kids during the opening scene, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of an unseen punishment. But none of the adults in this movie — Mihai included — are able to practice what they preach, a failure of perspective that allows the divides between them to grow as thick as the walls that protect the local school from the avalanches that crash down upon it whenever the drama gets too intense. “What does it mean to be a good neighbor?”, “Fjord” wonders in Mungiu’s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves?

Grade: B+

“Fjord” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.

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