Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’ Tackles the Culture War in Potential Palme d’Or Contender [Cannes]

In what has been, so far, a weak competition lineup at Cannes, here’s a film that could easily emerge as a major Palme d’Or contender — mostly because it’s gripping in a very direct, accessible way, taking a deeply polarizing subject and turning it into something painfully authentic. It also received the longest standing ovation at Cannes so far this year, lasting 13 minutes.

Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director best known for his Palme d’Or-winning “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” is indeed back in Cannes competition with “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, and once again tackles the rot in our world, the societal decay that could eventually lead to our demise.

“Fjord,” which currently sits at 79 on Metacritic, follows Stan’s Mihai Gheorghiu, a Romanian software engineer who moves his deeply religious family from Bucharest to rural Norway, hoping for a better life in his wife Lisbet’s hometown. Reinsve plays Lisbet. It doesn’t take long for tensions to boil over. You see, this family adheres to conservative Catholic values, which immediately clash with the hyper-progressive culture around them. Mihai’s strict parenting, religious beliefs, and old-school discipline make the family feel almost alien in a society that constantly prides itself on openness and tolerance.

The film’s central crisis kicks in when Norwegian child welfare authorities discover bruises on the Gheorghius’ eldest daughter and remove all five children from the home pending investigation. What starts as a domestic dispute spirals into a massive legal and cultural battle. The parents are told that, under Norwegian law, suspicion alone can justify separating children from their family. Authorities insist they’re acting in the children’s best interest.

Based on real events, the story gradually turns into a “culture war,” a national spectacle, with religious communities rallying behind the Gheorghius family while Norwegian officials argue that the parents’ style of discipline poses a threat to the children’s safety.

What Mungiu is really digging at here is the discomfort liberal societies feel toward people who don’t fit the accepted cultural mold. How tolerant can a society actually be when confronted with beliefs it fundamentally rejects? This is a film about how extremism feeds extremism. Everybody believes they’re morally right. Everybody becomes trapped inside ideology, fear, and self-righteousness. Nobody is capable of stepping outside themselves long enough to actually listen.

Despite the presence of Stan and Reinsve — and this being Mungiu’s first film largely spoken in Norwegian and English — it doesn’t feel like some major stylistic reinvention for the filmmaker. This is still unmistakably Mungiu: the same slow-burn pacing, the same long takes, the same handheld realism, the same emotionally suffocating atmosphere. His longtime aesthetic remains fully intact, helped immensely by cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s icy widescreen photography, drenched in those familiar cold blue-gray hues. That said, almost 20 years later, and a handful of strong films under his belt, including this one, Mungiu still hasn’t topped “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Maybe he never will.

“Fjord” marks Mungiu’s sixth feature and further solidifies him as one of the essential voices in Romanian cinema, alongside previous works like “Beyond the Hills,” “Graduation,” and “R.M.N.” It’s already riling up many who cannot support a story whose main protagonists are conservatives. But the film is much more than that: they are no heroes either, just people utterly convinced by their own flawed beliefs, and caught up in a cultural battle that’s destroying the fabric of society.