The setting of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord is so picture-perfect that by the laws of cinema, something must be terribly wrong. When a Romanian family moves to a Norwegian hamlet surrounded by an astoundingly photogenic fjord, everything looks just so. The cozy homes appointed with tasteful bric-a-brac, the sleekly modernist school, the residents’ cheeriness; the whole picture is just waiting for an Ari Aster-style revelation to detonate the contentment.
What gives this legal drama its kick is that the wrong comes not from what lies beneath, but what is right on the surface.
The Gheorghiu family seems to fit right in. The parents have their place: Romanian-born Mihai (Sebastian Stan) works as an IT engineer, while his Norwegian wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), is a nurse at a rest home. Their five children are tentative but make the best of it, and the two oldest—Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu)—strike up a friendship with rebellious teenager Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen).
As devout evangelicals, the Gheorghius stand out in the aggressively secular village, which nevertheless makes a show of welcoming them. That veneer of acceptance, however, is wiped away once the family is accused of committing an act they didn’t even know was illegal. A teacher sees bruises on Elia and is told that their parents sometimes hit them. Since even the slightest corporal punishment is illegal in Norway, the machinery of the state cranks into action with a terrifyingly cold inexorability.
Based on a real story from 2015, Mungiu’s film is largely a procedural nightmare in which seemingly well-meaning officials wrench a family apart without appearing to question the correctness of their actions. As the Gheorghius’ children are placed into protective care, the community closes ranks against the family, spreading stories about their strange beliefs (not allowing the children to have smartphones, teaching them that homosexuality is a sin).
This dynamic presents an inversion to what is expected in festival-friendly global auteur cinema, where the sympathetic targets of ostracism are rarely white or Christian. Mungiu hints at this in a scene where a conservative protestor supporting the family declares this prejudice would not be accepted if the Gheorghius were a different religion or color.
While Fjord wades into this culture war in ways that will provoke some who would prefer it show the Gheorghius as wrong-thinking, Mungiu does not appear to be looking to score points. He presents the religious freedom activists as simply louder versions of the quietly disapproving villagers, whose bourgeois liberal pieties leave just as little room for self-doubt.
Fjord lacks the sweep of Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but both works share an interest in how systems blind to individual humanity unthinkingly grind people down. To that end, Mungiu maintains a throughline of unknowability. While Mihai and Lisbet acknowledge lightly slapping their kids on the rear, or in one instance shoving them to keep them from being burned, it is never shown how Elia received her bruises.
Multiple dialogue scenes illustrate how mistranslations, in a film where most characters speak several languages, change the frame of reference for nearly every meaningful action. Though Mihai and Lisbet’s strong beliefs suggest dour fanaticism, Mungiu shows them (at least on the surface) as well-adjusted, loving parents. At times, the film can feel like a kindred work to Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything (2026), another film about the finite limits of comprehension and people’s essential unknowability.
Fjord‘s atmosphere of uncertainty keeps the courtroom scenes from pivoting on dispositive revelations of guilt or innocence, focusing instead on the absurdity of the proceedings. One unfortunate result is Mungiu’s reliance on the old trope in which a standup lawyer—in this case, Gheorghius’ neighbor Mia (Lisa Carlehed)—pronounces the wrongness of a prosecution with righteous indignation.
Moments like those courtroom scenes tilt Fjord toward a more generic experience than the film initially promised. This drama’s subtle power is also undercut by the child actors’ strangely wooden performances and inconclusive subplots (a possible romance between Noora and one of the Gheorghius’ children, a sickly and suicidal neighbor) that distract from the narrative without enriching it.
Though often compelling, Fjord ends on a somewhat flat note, never giving the audience a clearer understanding of the characters at its core. Mungiu’s themes of intolerance and the madness of bureaucracy resonate unquestionably. However, because the characters lack enough three-dimensionality, those themes fail to come alive with the spirit of humanism he strives for.