Most people want to feel like we’re normal. But for that to be the case, those around us mostly have to make the same choices and profess the same values that we do. Even in the most pluralistic society, straying from the prevailing orthodoxy (or heterodoxy, as the case may be) can land you in trouble. And this is precisely what happens to (a very bald) Sebastian Stan and (a very willowy) Renate Reinsve in “Fjord,” Romanian filmmaker Christian Mungiu’s latest, and most fraught, family drama.
In this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Stan and Reinsve play a married couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, long based in Bucharest, Romania, but who seize the chance to move to a small seaside town in Norway where Lisbet’s family is from. They and their five children try to assimilate among their quite secular neighbors — there is, at worst, a rebellious Catholic teen — but a set of cultural misunderstandings and a poorly placed bruise soon land all five of the Gheorghiu children in protective custody. Mihai and Lisbet, alone among strangers, suddenly need to prove that they aren’t the religious fundamentalist monsters that it’s all too easy for their neighbors to decide that they are.
As IndieWire’s own David Ehrlich wrote in his review, “If that sounds like the recipe for a faith-based persecution drama (or so much worse: an 146-minute dose of Bill Maher-like sermonizing against the messily applied impulse to make the world a better place), rest assured that Mungiu is much less interested in defending biblical values than he is in interrogating the nuclear friction at the root of even the “nicest” culture clash… A slow-burn snowball that achieves much — or at least some — of Mungiu’s signature entropy despite eschewing the more overt bigotries that fueled his previous films, ‘Fjord‘ digs its heels deeper and deeper into the situation as Mihai and Lisbet do their best to cooperate with the investigation.”
“Fjord” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. The film will be released in theaters on Friday, October 9. Watch the full trailer below.
