Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme D’Or almost 20 years ago for his 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and there’s every chance he’s just put himself back in contention for another major Cannes prize. His new effort, Fjord, is one of the clear highlights from this year’s Competition line-up at the festival.
The quietly gripping film sees him team up with a pair of recent acting Oscar nominees in Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve and Mungiu’s countryman and long-time Marvel star Sebastian Stan for a knotty, complex moral tale that functions both as a fascinating conversation piece and a first-rate work of thoroughly engrossing drama.
Reinsve and Stan – who previously starred together in the underrated psychological film A Different Man in 2024 – play Lisbet and Mihai Gheorghiu, a couple who have just relocated with their five young children from Romania to a small village in the former's Norwegian homeland.
From our very first encounter with the family, it’s clear there's something a little off. In a striking opening scene that instantly establishes the film’s off-kilter atmosphere, eldest daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) is told to hug her father and accept her “punishment”, although we're not told precisely the nature of the wrongdoing she has committed.
We are soon to learn that Mihai and Lisbet are a deeply conservative religious couple and have raised their children accordingly. They adopt a strict disciplinary approach while restricting the use of such frivolous things as dancing and YouTube, and also possess a number of old-fashioned beliefs that seem unlikely to fly in the progressive nation they’ve just moved to.
Still, to begin with, the Gheorgius are welcomed with open (if privately suspicious) arms by their amicable and well-mannered neighbours, including the local headteacher who asks his own slightly rebellious daughter to serve as a buddy for the new arrivals at school.
But then comes a major turning point. After spotting some alarming bruises on Elia’s body during gym class – where they have been partaking in bouts of wrestling – a teacher contacts Child Protection Services. Almost before blinking, all five kids have been taken from their parents and an investigation opened into accusations of child abuse.
Lisbet and Mihai are both bemused and affronted. Although the latter admits to having lightly slapped his children as punishment – something he says was considered perfectly acceptable in his own society – Mungiu leaves it deliberately ambiguous to what extent these bruises were actually inflicted by their parents or whether they may have come from another source (a wrestling class at school, for example).
What follows is a transfixing drama that poses a number of thorny questions. Are Mihai and Lisbet really on trial for these specific acts of supposed violence, or have they been targeted by the community because they espouse beliefs that put them out of touch with their new neighbours? The kids seem defensive enough of their parents, but then, could that be a by-product of the slightly sinister control their mother and father exert over them?
And crucially, can it really be considered progressive to take children away from their parents simply because we disagree with how they are being raised and the values they are being passed down, even if we're unsure whether any actual crime has been committed?
The extended, dialogue-heavy trial scenes may put audiences in mind of another recent Palme D’Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall, and they're certainly equally riveting, with Mungiu's sharp dialogue and unshowy direction – full of long takes and visually interesting blocking – expertly drawing us into the case.
Tonally, the film is perfectly judged, operating at just the right level of offbeat to be unsettling without ever dipping into anything too overtly absurdist. The same goes for the central performances; Reinsve and Stan intelligently play their characters not as monsters but as something more nuanced, and even if we take issue with the characters' parenting methods and value systems, we are able to empathise with their plight.
It's all richly compelling stuff – a culture war drama that's provocative without being sensationalist.
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