Cristian Mungiu’s thought-provoking family drama explores the fault lines between religious belief, immigration and liberal values, resisting easy answers to some of Europe’s most pressing contemporary debates.
Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord took home the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes (Mungiu’s second of his career) and a few months later screened at Rome Film Fest. Fjord follows a Romanian-Norwegian family who relocate to a remote village on Norway’s western coast. Mihai (Sebastian Stan), a devout Christian, and his Norwegian wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) are raising their five children according to strict religious principles, but when their teenage daughter Elia turns up at school with bruises, suspicions about their parenting escalate into a child protection investigation.
What begins as a story about one family’s difficulties adjusting to a new home gradually opens into much broader questions of immigration, assimilation, religious freedom and the limits of tolerance. How far should a liberal society take political correctness? When does protecting children become an excuse for cultural prejudice? Who are the ‘right’ kind of minority and who are the ‘wrong’?
These incredibly contemporary debates are handled with care by Mungiu. The family’s rigid beliefs and authoritarian parenting are difficult to defend, but so too is the ease with which the local authorities begin to interpret their difference. Binary division and a lack of nuance are ever on the rise in our age of polarisation and social media silos, where empathy feels hard to reach, but films like Fjord bring complexity and emotionality to these raging culture war issues.
Mungiu builds conflict through the small frictions of everyday life, the minor misunderstandings that accumulate between neighbours, and the shifting relationships between the children themselves. The performances are excellent, particularly Stan and Reinsve. The film is also beautifully shot – it would be hard to make that kind of Norwegian landscapes look anything but magnificent.
At 146 minutes, Fjord is considerably pacier than I expected, a politically charged family drama that speeds by. In an increasingly polarised Europe, where debates about immigration, religious identity and liberal values are so often reduced to simplistic narratives, Mungiu makes a compelling case for staying with the discomfort of paradox, ambiguity and contradiction. Fjord doesn’t offer easy answers, and it is all the more worthwhile for it.
The 21st edition of the Rome Film Fest is running from October 13th to 25th, 2026.
