A soft upright piano playing “Amazing Grace” drapes in warmly over the opening image of Fjord: a powder-blue-hued glacial mountain towering over the glistening Norwegian fjord around which Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) have resettled their seven-person family. Lisbet, a Norwegian nurse, and Mihai, a Romanian aeronautical engineer, just moved to the idyllic seaside village in Norway from Bucharest, where their devout evangelical Christian faith held a much better reputation in the conservative home country of writer-director Cristian Mungiu, who’s aimed his last two features (Graduation, R.M.N.) at the pitfalls of its uber-traditional society.
The Gheorghius don’t necessarily come across as a good hang. They spend all their free time singing worship songs and reading scripture, and insist their children do the same. The two teenage eldest of the five, chronic rule-followers Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), have no access to the internet, much less YouTube. When she sees an electric piano at school, Elia can’t help but play a hymn, just like her father did when he was touring the campus. Both are lightly reprimanded by the Norwegians near them. “We don’t do evangelism at school,” Mats, their neighbor, tells Elia with a smile. Even their outfits are conservative: long, unflattering grey skirts and Mennonite-esque hair tied up for Lisbet, turtlenecks and blazers for Mihai.
Their poised stance against homosexuality is abominable, their casual tendency to spank their children a reprehensible relic of generations past. Both are anachronisms in a modern global age that sees the backwards ideological strongholds as thought crimes—in Norway, actual crimes. So much so that, in the middle of the afternoon, after a teacher develops reason to believe they’ve been spanked, Child Protective Services arrive unannounced to take the children into custody while they investigate the situation. But, like anyone else, the Gheorghius deserve their liberties and a proper defense in court from the iron-fisted Norwegian powers that have gone so far left that they’ve come back around to the right—flown the country so close to the sun of liberalism that they’ve begun to burn the minorities who live there. (“They never had communism,” Mihai remarks critically.)
Several key questions run through the veins of Fjord. The first is whether or not the Gheorghius are physically abusing their children. But when they openly admit to occasionally spanking them, and the children say the same, the question transforms: should parents be allowed to do this? If not, what should be the punishment for parents? Should their children be legally seized for the remainder of their youth? Another question, one the film refuses to weigh in on for its audience, hangs in the balance: at what point does spanking become beating or physical abuse?
Civil and criminal trials hang over Lisbet and Mihai’s baffled heads like a spectre of familial death as they prepare for their internationally publicized civil trial, which CPS keeps postponing in hopes of the criminal trial taking place first—one that will almost certainly find the Gheorghius guilty per Norwegian legislation. In a culture-versus-law showdown for the ages, the Gheorghius ask Mia (Lisa Carlehed)—a liberal atheist neighbor whose wrist-cutting, fuck-saying, and rule-breaking daughter becomes an influence on Elia and Emmanuel—to represent them. Mia agrees, finding the state’s stance harsh and damaging to the children in light of something as minor as spanking when the kids want to go home, the Gheorghius have promised never to do it again, and they clearly didn’t know they were committing a crime in the first place. Together, they take a religious-persecution angle that suggests the Gheorghius are facing discrimination.
Avalanches cascade in the background of the western Norwegian port town, a visual metaphor for the impenetrable layers of icy, inhuman behavior that characterizes most Norwegians in the film (save Mia, who considers the situation with reason and beyond its legal precedent). The CPS representative who first tells Lisbet what’s going on is so clinical in her responses that it’s as if they were programmed ahead of time, not an ounce of empathy or discerning logic in her bones. Yet she acts on behalf of the state, in the name of principles with which almost anyone would agree. Among them: “You shouldn’t hit your kids.”
The original lawyer who represents them takes on the same unblinking, robotic tone before she bails on them as calmly as she signed up simply because they’re upset. There’s an irony to a rationalism that doesn’t consider the human soul. Take, for instance, a CPS representative insisting there’s no evidence that suggests children are better off with non-abusive biological parents than a set of foster parents if the kids and new parents get along—an idea that requires no research to debunk.
Up against the cold, overbearing, soulless characterization of a Norwegian CPS operating in the name of reducing risk, the Gheorghius’ strict, silly rules for their children come across as something they’ll merely have to mature past when they’re older and opposed to something that will ruin their lives. Mungiu accentuates the lack of rigidity by showing how easy it is for Elia and Emmanuel to break their parents’ rules when peer-pressured by Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen), a reality anyone who grew up in a religious home knows is true.
As progressive as Norway’s ideals may be, and however much one might agree with them on paper, Mungiu draws out the maltreatment in forcing someone to conform to laws of a society that are against their relatively harmless beliefs. The one thing the Norwegian state does have is an absolutely gobstopping courtroom that hovers over the fjord with floor-to-ceiling windows brandishing the celestial glow of the mountainous region in the background of every shot.
Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru and colorist Andu Radu once again wed their efforts to create the most aesthetically pleasing film of Cannes thus far, as they did with R.M.N. in 2022—a chilly sky blue masks the region in a beauty that’s hard to appreciate amidst the operation of its society. Reinsve and Stan are terrific, playing the conservative matriarch and patriarch with a gentle, hushed desperation, quaking in the wake of losing their five children forever as if they already have.
As with R.M.N., Mungiu is in top-shelf operation. Fjord is a triumphant film that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us, regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. What the court will rule in both cases, and whether or not the Gheorghius will get back their kids, pulses with a pregnant tension as the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film proceeds in what seems 30 minutes. And its end will have you falling off the edge of your seat.
Fjord premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.