Fjord

No one is pining for the fjords by the end of this slow-boiling cauldron of a moral drama. Shot with a subdued palette and set in a small waterside community in rural Norway, Cristian Mungiu’s (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) film has Renate Reinsve and unrecognisable Marvel star Sebastian Stan as a Norwegian mum and her Romanian engineer husband, who discover that the warm welcome of their new home town doesn’t extend past a slice or two of cake and a tour of the high school.

Mungiu quickly sets up his inciting incident: Lisbet (Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu’s (Stan) teenage daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), one of their five children, is spotted with unexplained bruises by her new teacher. Worried these were inflicted by her parents’ corporal punishment, the teacher reports this to the local child protection agency. It escalates when Elia admits that her dad has ‘slapped’ them.

And he has. Mihai is a stern but loving dad guided by his family’s strict faith. The old ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ ideology is intact in his culture, but in his new homeland, it’s a crime. The stakes are existential: prison and the loss of their kids. Even their next-door neighbours, the school’s pompous headmaster and his sympathetic lawyer wife, initially so welcoming, back away. Only their own tearaway teenager Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) stands by the family, and especially Elia, on whom she harbours a crush. That, in turn, will come to inform the homophobic Mihai’s decisions. 

Inevitably, Fjord will be a Rorschach test for viewers

Fjord is redolent of Thomas Vinterberg’s superior 2012 drama The Hunt, in which Mads Mikkelsen’s kindergarten teacher is accused of child abuse and the words of children are interpreted without nuance and used as cast-iron testimony. The intervening 14 years have added complex new social dynamics that Mungiu is eager to explore: migration, growing mistrust of religion in secular societies, and a damaging blend of progressive values and nanny state bureaucracy.

Inevitably, Fjord will be a Rorschach test for viewers. It’s an easy film to project your values onto, but no one emerges unscathed. Mungiu hyperbolises both sides of the divide, offering a villain in Ellen Dorrit Petersen’s officious child protection head, and a hilariously awful scene in which the Gheorghiu’s baby is shambolically taken away. But it also throws in a pair of rabble-rousing Romanian diplomats who amp up the culture war battlelines. All the while, the kids are separated, from their parents and each other.

The Romanian filmmaker has tackled similar themes before, most recently in 2022’s Transylvanian xenophobia drama R.M.N., but it’s extra punchy to see him casting a steely glance at a society other than his own. His latest is another chilly but gripping effort, that surges from cosy to traumatic in a heartbeat. 

Fjord premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.