Fjord: curiously underdeveloped addition to Cristian Mungiu’s body of work explores religious persecution in a small Scandinavian town
The Romanian director’s Palme d'Or-winning film about evangelical parents who are suspected of child abuse is filled with spectacular and unnerving imagery, but is let down by unconvincing characterisation.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
It is not much of an exaggeration to describe the logline of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord like so: ‘Norwegian Child Protection Services Versus a Family of Evangelical Christian Romanian Émigrés’. But from the film’s stark premise about religious persecution in a small Scandinavian town, formal pleasures abound. Widescreen images of magnificent natural vistas contrast sharply with the cartoonish characters that populate this intolerant place.
Mungiu has built a reputation from a body of work that methodically interrogates authoritarian systems and social disenfranchisement within Romania, winning the Palme d’Or in 2007 for abortion drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Fjord is a curious addition to this corpus, not simply because it is set in the Norwegian port town of Ålesund. Purportedly a fictionalised version of three real cases dating back a decade, this lightly comic drama flattens its antagonists to dead-eyed villains. It targets Scandinavian progressives for not caring about the rights of – as a Christian patriarch puts it – “the wrong type of minorities.”
We arrive in Ålesund with the Gheorghiu brood who have decided to make a new life in this glacial town in the middle of nowhere. Its geographic particularities, flanked by both mountains and water, create the feeling of a sealed-off world camouflaged by nature and able to play by its own rules. Trained nurse Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), who is Norwegian by birth, relocates with her husband, aeronautical engineer Mihai (an unrecognisable Sebastian Stan embracing his origins), and their five children, including a newborn baby.
“We’re all neighbours here,” says Mats (Markus Tønseth) welcoming the Gheorghiu family with an unnerving level of cheer. Like everyone in this sparsely-populated civil outpost, Mats wears many hats, from school headteacher to the welcome wagon. It won’t be long before bus driver/Child Protection Services advisor Frida uses her dual roles to make a case against the newcomers.
Mungiu gives them time to settle in first. The older Gheorghiu kids, teenagers Elia and Emmanuel, bond with the smitten Nora, daughter of their next door neighbour who is – you guessed it – Mats. His wife Mia is a former lawyer who now cares for Mat’s father Ake, who is recovering from a stroke. Set pieces display wholesome Nordic hospitality. The consternation that arises when, say, Mihai and Lisbet punish their children by refusing to let them attend Nora’s birthday could just be the teething pains of people adjusting to each other’s values.
It is a treat to be in the hands of a director with such skill for image-making. Mungiu’s collaborator since Graduation (2016), DoP Tudor Vladimir Panduru (who also shot the brilliant Iraq-set The President’s Cake), maintains a distance from the action to better show how characters appear within the bigger picture. Lisbet’s new job at a nursing home requires her to be on call for the dead and the dying. In a bittersweet existential tableau that evokes the work of Roy Andersson, she stands in the background, inscrutable behind owlish glasses, while considering how to approach what looms in the foreground: a substantial and nude fresh corpse.
But the images take precedence over the creation of multi-dimensional characters. Elia and Emmanuel talk like they’re in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, speaking in a deadpan drained of emotional affect. This dialogue is played for comic beats when the devout teenagers defend their religious principles. “My god, you’re sexy,” Nora tells Elia. “You better not mention God in this context,” Elia returns without feeling.
Elia’s feelings are, ostensibly, the heart of the drama, as Frida’s observation that she has two bruises on her body leads to all five children being taken away from Mihai and Lisbet with lightning speed, with a civil and criminal trial to follow. After this unfolds, it feels like Mungiu is mounting an inverted production of The Crucible and it’s unclear whether the Gheorghius are being judged for suspected child abuse, for not letting their children watch YouTube or whether the local legislature believes that one is the same as the other.
The film avoids defining what constitutes physical abuse and despite regular back and forths on whether spanking a child counts, Mungiu is not really curious on this front, as he ushers the very people who could resolve this off stage: the children themselves. He is far more motivated by the chance to vilify the ghouls working for the CPS – they have more in common with the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) than with caring professionals. The most realised character and – perhaps – Mungiu’s avatar is Mia, who returns to the legal field out of her belief that no minority is wrong enough to be stripped of their rights. Reinsve, known for her emotional luminosity on screen, strikes a different note here in an impassive performance that keeps Lisbet somewhat of a mystery. By not endowing either her or Mihai with engaging traits, Mungiu drains Fjord down to basic principles. However, he weakens the impact of his moral play by treating his targets the same way they treat the Gheorghius: building a case against them based on a dehumanising characterisation.