![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/4f3255658d975b9f4ac2bc453e24c75ff6-MCDFJOR-EC001.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: NEON\/Courtesy Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
When the credits rolled on Cristian Mungiu\u2019s latest, Fjord, at the end of a screening at Cannes, the person sitting next to me gasped \u201cSebastian Stan!?\u201d with the horrified delight of someone who had not been remotely aware of its leading man\u2019s identity. Stan isn\u2019t exactly unrecognizable in the film, though with his glasses and shaved head, he looks a lot more regular joe than superhero. It\u2019s more that you don\u2019t expect a Marvel star to turn up in a film by Romania\u2019s most talented social miserabilist, the director who won the 2007 Palme d\u2019Or for the astonishing, excruciating abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Then again, Stan, who was born and spent the first eight years of his life in Romania, has been pointedly seeking out edgier and more challenging work between his bouts with the cape, from Aaron Schimberg\u2019s droll indie fable A Different Man to his turn as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Fjord is Stan\u2019s most ambitious turn yet, not because he performs half the role in Romanian but because he deftly plays a character, Mihai Gheorghiu, who constantly tests the audience\u2019s sympathies even as he and his family find themselves at the center of a domestic nightmare.<\/p>\n
Mihai, an aeronautical engineer, is Romanian, while his nurse wife, Lisbet (Sentimental Value\u2019s Renate Reinsve, who also starred alongside Stan in A Different Man), is Norwegian. They had been raising their five children, the youngest of whom is just a baby, in Bucharest, but they recently relocated to a village stunningly situated alongside a fjord in Norway to be closer to Lisbet\u2019s mother. When someone introduces themself to the Gheorghius by noting that they\u2019re pretty much all neighbors around here, it\u2019s a friendly welcome but also a statement of fact. Mats (Markus Scarth T\u00f8nseth), the principal at the school the four older siblings attend, literally lives across the street from the family. Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), the rebellious classmate who develops an instant connection to Elia (Vanessa Ceban), the Gheorghius\u2019 oldest, is Mats\u2019s daughter. But the Gheorghius\u2019 attempts to weave themselves into the fabric of the town don\u2019t go smoothly, in part because they\u2019re conservative Evangelicals who keep a tight rein on their children and are strict in a way that clearly contrasts with the permissive modern parenting the rest of the town prefers. When one of Elia\u2019s teachers spots bruises on her body in PE class one day, she decides to call in child protective services.<\/p>\n
From there, Fjord cascades into a series of procedural battles and legal proceedings as caseworkers decide it would be safest to remove the Gheorghiu children from their parents\u2019 care while investigating suspicions of abuse. Mungiu has masterfully depicted bureaucratic abuses, religious oppression, and xenophobia in his past movies, but in Fjord he offers a fascinating photo-negative version of those dynamics: The progressive Norwegian state, with its insistence on doing what\u2019s in the best interests of the children, becomes the crushing institutional force. Gunda (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a smooth-faced blonde who weaponizes her sense of calm and is capable of maintaining a terrifyingly reasonable tone while arguing that there\u2019s no reason to believe a biological parent\u2019s care is always ideal, is the main wielder of child protective services\u2019 tautological defenses. But as the foster-care ordeal goes on and Mihai and Lisbet go from being aghast to attempting to jump through the required hoops, it becomes clear that the issues at play aren\u2019t just questions about whether they have hit their children but about how they\u2019ve been raising them.<\/p>\n
Not allowing your child to have a phone, or listen to secular music, or understand homosexuality as anything other than a mortal sin may not constitute abuse, but it clearly puts the Gheorghius at odds with the culture of the community. If Fjord were a film involving, say, a family of Muslim immigrants, you might expect certain rhythms to its conflicts and power dynamics. But the Euro-on-Euro aspect and subsequent value clashes in Mungiu\u2019s film create wildly unpredictable rearrangements of sympathies as the story unfolds. Mungiu remains shockingly gifted at drawing suspense out of characters who are trying to navigate unfair systems, but even if it\u2019s never really in doubt that the Gheorghius should be allowed to have back the children they clearly love, it\u2019s also enjoyably disorienting to watch a movie in which the main underdog is a bigoted pro-spanking Christian traditionalist who is being menaced by cheerfully polite humanists who keep citing the word trauma. It wouldn\u2019t take much to turn this scenario into a right-wing culture-war fantasy, and occasionally, especially when the sneering child-protective-services attorney played by Christian Rubeck is onscreen, it does tilt too much in that direction.<\/p>\n
But Mungiu has a lot more on his mind than tepidly insisting both sides can be bad. For all the political pole reversal that happens in Fjord, the movie stealthily argues what\u2019s really going on here is that old standards about assimilation and cultural uniformity have just been given a socially acceptable gloss. (The school in town holds a dutiful S\u00e1mi cultural celebration, but as one of the allies Mihai summons from Romania points out, Norway has an ugly history of \u201ccivilizing\u201d the Indigenous population.) Mihai, with his utter humorlessness, his insistence on playing \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d in the cafeteria at lunch, and his beliefs about a \u201ctraditional family,\u201d is never going to blend seamlessly into the overall culture of the town he has been trying to make his own. What Fjord asks, in ways that are sincere and complicated, is how much that matters to his living there.<\/p>\n
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