‘Fjord’ Cannes Review: Mungiu’s State-Versus-Family Drama is Blunt and Surprisingly Shallow

The enemy is the state. That is the animating premise of Cristian Mungiu’s new film, set in Norway — a premise that any far-right voter anywhere in the Western world will find deeply congenial. Fjord follows a Romanian family who relocate to Norway only to find their children taken away by authorities who deem their parenting abusive. The director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days frames the story as a broader indictment of ideological and religious fanaticism, but what the film is really about — and where its sympathies clearly lie — is the intrusion of a liberal state into the life of a traditional family that simply wants to raise its children according to its own customs.

An almost unrecognizable Sebastian Stan plays Mihai, a stern and devoutly religious Romanian man who has moved to a small, picturesque coastal town in Norway, the hometown of his wife Lisbet, played by Renate Reinsve. Together they have five children and belong to a deeply conservative Christian denomination: no television, no dancing, no internet, daily prayer, constant religious discussion. When they enroll the children in the local school, they enter a world that operates by very different assumptions.

One day a gym teacher notices bruises on Elia, the family’s teenage daughter, and files a report with child protective services without conducting much of an investigation. Authorities arrive and, after speaking with the older children — who acknowledge that their father occasionally disciplines them with a light smack — decide to remove all five children from the home pending resolution of the case. That includes the two eldest, two younger ones, and an infant of just a few months.

There is nothing the couple can do to resolve what they insist is a misunderstanding. What reads to them as custom, tradition, cultural habit — reads to the Norwegian state as a criminal offense that could land the father in prison. This collision of frameworks detonates, in the ensuing legal proceedings, a full-blown culture war: the parents backed by religious hardliners and champions of the traditional family, who frame Norway’s intervention as cultural persecution and even racism.

For all of Mungiu’s gestures toward evenhandedness — he does acknowledge excesses on both sides of the ideological divide — his sympathies are not hard to locate. These are devoted, loving parents whose habits are somewhat out of step with prevailing norms but who are not, in any reasonable reading, dangerous. The lawyers and caseworkers of child protective services, by contrast, are rendered as cardboard villains: bureaucrats who believe they are protecting children while actually dismantling a family.

Mungiu shoots in his customary style — long takes, measured distance from his subjects, a camera that observes rather than editorializes — across scenes that often strain credulity and toggle awkwardly between Norwegian and English. The beautiful but frigid landscape suits the film’s emotional register, if not its intellectual one. Because the argument Mungiu constructs here is, for a filmmaker of his caliber, remarkably blunt: he has selected the most extreme possible case of political correctness run amok and presented it as a representative specimen. The implicit logic is the same one used by far right politicians everywhere: that any state interference in family life is, by definition, malicious, damaging, and an assault on individual freedom.

Two subplots run alongside the main story — one involving the elderly father of the family’s neighbors, who has suffered a stroke; another following that neighbors’ rebellious daughter, who befriends Elia — but neither is developed with enough care to matter. They exist mainly to surface at convenient moments and nudge the central narrative. They do nothing to deepen what is, at its core, a thesis film of startling shallowness, one that reveals precious little understanding of the political and cultural moment engulfing Europe — and whose own rhetoric contributes, whether intentionally or not, to exactly that confusion.