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Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a married couple in Norway who are accused of abusing their children in the new drama Fjord
The movie won Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, in May 2026
Fjord is in theaters Oct. 9
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play parents under investigation on allegations they abuse their children in their new movie.
On Thursday, Aug. 27, Neon released the trailer for Fjord, from Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu. The movie, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or — the festival’s top prize — back in May, sees Stan, 44, portray a Romanian man and evangelical Christian who moves to Norway with his Norwegian wife (Reinsve, 38) and their five children so as to be closer to her family. The family’s strong religious beliefs and parents’ approach to discipline come into question when teachers at school notice unexplained bruises on the couple’s oldest daughter, leading to an inquiry from Norway’s child protection services that quickly spirals into a potential criminal sentence for the parents.
“A Norwegian woman and her devout Romanian husband relocate with their five children to a remote, close-knit coastal town,” reads an official synopsis for the movie. “Their teenage children form a fast bond with a neighboring family as unease begins to simmer around their rigid beliefs. When allegations of abuse emerge, they are forced to confront a system of judgment that blurs the lines between concern and prejudice.”
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve in Fjord
Credit: NEON
Fjord is Stan and Reinsve’s second movie together after 2024’s A Different Man. The pair of actors get a rare opportunity to play characters from their own countries in the film; Stan was born in Romania and moved to the United States as a child, while Reinsve is from Norway. The movie’s cast also includes teenage actors Vanessa Cuban and Jonathan Ciprian Breeze as the couple’s oldest children, as well as Norwegian actors Lisa Carlehed, Henrikke Lund-Olsen, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Lisa Loven Kongsli and Markus Tønseth.
According to Norway’s public broadcasting service NRK, Fjord is based on a number of real child welfare cases that took place in the country. Stan, who has transformed himself physically for recent movies like A Different Man and The Apprentice, does the same in Fjord, donning a shaved head and glasses as a middle-aged father. Filmmaker Mungiu, 58, told Deadline in May that he thought Stan was “too good-looking, somehow. Sebastian was very generous and he followed my idea about how he should be looking for Fjord. As the film proves, he doesn’t need to be handsome to keep you glued to the screen.”
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Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve in Fjord, in theaters Oct. 9
Credit: Tudor Panduru
“I can’t thank him enough for this, and I believe I should thank his girlfriend as well,” he said at the time.
Fjord is in theaters Oct. 9. Many of Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or winners have received Academy Award nominations in six of the last seven years, including the movies Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora and last year’s It Was Just an Accident.
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