TIFF 51: “Fjord” works great as a conversation starter
Friday, September 11, 2026 at 9:00AM 
I don’t want this to become a yearly tradition. However, it’s notable that, for the second TIFF in a row, I chose to cap my first day at the fest with a Cannes prizewinner starring Renate Reinsve, coming hot into the awards season with NEON’s backing and the recommendation of a battalion of fellow critics I follow. And at the end, I find myself a contrarian. But while Sentimental Value was merely a disappointment, Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord is much worse, an outright catastrophe that’s probably my most despised Palme d’Or choice since Sophia Loren’s jury decided to give the festival’s top prize to The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, way back in 1966. Reinsve innocent, though…
After eleven years covering film festivals as a critic, one finds themselves growing wary of having directors introduce their works – let’s not even talk about audience Q&As, full of “this is more of a comment than a question” – yet you try not to hold that against the picture you’re about to see. For Fjord’s first TIFF public screening, the Romanian New Wave icon that is Mungiu started the night by apologizing for having won a second Palme d’Or. You see, the man’s been on the jury himself, and he knows how difficult it is to come to a consensus, often coming down to a film hitting at the right time to resonate. So, does that mean Fjord is a movie for our times? Much to ponder.
He followed this with a good ol’ humble-brag about working for the first time with what one would call A-listers, before being joined on stage by one of those stars – Sebastian Stan. As they wrapped the intro, both men reaffirmed an idea that has been spouted both by Fjord’s team and its biggest fans since it bowed at the Croisette. What we were about to see was an exercise in looking at different sides of a difficult situation, a neutral depiction that would, hopefully, spark dialogue, maybe between different audience members or maybe just the viewer and themselves. One hears this and builds up expectations.
Well, Fjord fails to meet them as it’s decidedly not what was promised. Ostensibly based on the Bodnariu family case, this trilingual affair concerns the plight of a Christian conservative family that includes a Romanian father, a Norwegian mother, and their five children. For unspecified reasons beyond the death of the patriarch’s parents, the couple has decided to immigrate from Romania, where they had met, married and raised their brood, to the matriarch’s home country. There, they bristle at Norway’s liberal politics and how such things are baked into the people and the law. What starts as an innocent culture clash rolls like a snowball down a mountain and soon becomes an avalanche.
One day, the Norwegian Child Welfare Services visit Lisbet Gheorghiu at home and tell her they’re there to take her children. An alarm was raised over some dubiously explained bruises on their eldest daughter, combined with a society wary of such staunch Bible thumping as the one practiced in their fundamentalist household. Apparently, the two teens went peacefully with the authorities already, and now they’re here to collect the three remaining kids, including an infant who still breastfeeds as its main source of sustenance. Outside, Norway’s flag flies ominously.
What follows is a clusterfuck of overzealous authority figures standing in the way of the Gheorghiu parents and their children, with two court cases at hand – one for the little ones’ custody and another on criminal charges of physical abuse. When Lisbet’s mild acquiescence to how things are done by Norwegian standards doesn’t produce results, Mihai gets in contact with folks back home, transforming their judicial conflict into a cause célèbre, a perfect piece for far-right propaganda in Romania and more fuel for certain factions of American Christianity’s persecution complex. Fjord lives in the moral gray zone, refusing to pass judgment. At least, it intends to.
If that were truly Mungiu’s intention, he failed. Why that would be his intention is another matter altogether, especially since his filmography hasn’t been shy about framing the moral quandaries it regularly proposes as having sides the audience should sympathize with more than others. Maybe this was a personal experiment that, again, didn't work. Because the film clearly takes sides, and it's one staunchly against a prejudiced Norwegian system and the hypocrisies of the tolerant liberals whose good intentions go all the way around into becoming intolerance towards cultures and traditions they find retrograde – corporate punishment as a parenting practice, for instance.
That’s the film’s primary thesis, whether it wants to admit it or not. It’s evident in how authorities are painted with a broad brush of villainy in dialogue, action, performance, and staging. To call these depictions neutral is to claim the prosecutor from Anatomy of a Fall was portrayed as that movie’s hero. This monolithic quality of social commentary should contradict the project’s putative impartiality, but it doesn’t stop there. Mungiu’s principal strategy doesn’t just flatten these government agents. It flattens them most severely and negatively, but it ends up flattening everyone and their story, often by omission until the character drama can barely function as such. Indeed, the events most debated, what the whole case hinges on, are never shown.
Indeed, one of our only points of access into the Gheorghius's regular domestic life, without any outsider in their midst, is the film’s first proper scene, when Stan embraces his on-screen daughter and portentously claims that “we have to admit when we’re wrong.” I’m sure that’s not going to come back to bite him in the ass. Anyway, other looks into the house are limited, often including their religious group or the neighbor’s rebellious daughter in some capacity. To the point that the children aren’t characters so much as they are mechanisms, half-heartedly centered for the first act before they’re almost entirely excised from Fjord.
You keep hearing about how they reacted to things, but never actually witnessing them. Much later, when she commits her first act of open defiance, the daughter dares to question her parents’ decisions and her interiority is almost parodically denied by a matter of framing. Her back is to the camera, hiding whatever her face might have revealed when she hears an apology that might or might not be the admission of wrongdoing teased at the beginning, insisted upon in court, yet never delivered until this point. Such omission is generalized, making characters shallower left and right, even the leads whose performers do a good job with what they have. But what they have is very little.
On its own, this plan is not doomed to fail. Turning the courtroom into a theater of memory, and using litigation through bad re-enactment and recounting, has its merits. Depurate it enough, embrace some Bressonian principle, and you might even end up with some modern masterpiece like Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. Or allow muralist complexity within the collective characterization while building on a foundation of impeccable cinematic form, and you approach the excellence of this same director’s R.M.N. Sadly, while Mungiu might have been aiming for Saint Omer, he ended up with an Angel Studios original instead.
And trust me, dear reader, what pained me most weren’t even the politics – I have long tried to make peace with the notion that I shouldn’t need art to confirm back to me my beliefs and that something downright evil may still be great art. It wasn’t the lack of great performances from a director whose casts never disappointed me before. On a side note, has Mungiu lost the ability to direct minors, or was this just an unfortunate crop further hindered by language barriers? Whatever the case, what pained me most is how Fjord has to be the director’s most prosaic work yet in formalist terms. And in this, I once again fall victim to high expectations.
Whoever chose the main stills to promote Fjord for its Cannes premiere was very smart, for they selected some of the picture’s best frames to achieve the brilliance I’ve come to expect from its auteur. Before the children are taken, there’s a beautiful congregation around the piano that showcases blocking the likes of which used to be standard moviemaking craft but is starting to acquire lost art status. The sparseness of the landscape is also a curious departure from Mungiu’s Romanian rurality, cramped cityscapes and interiors, blinding white snow and crystalline water inspiring a rigorous, painterly approach.
Sadly, such beauty is temporary. Fjord opts for indifferent construction in its place. At first, it seems the camera movement serves as a barometer of the younger characters’ temptation to stray from their parents’ strict rules, while also indicating tensions within the adults’ professional and social circles. This doesn’t last, and, by the time we’re stuck in court, it seems Mungiu has forgotten how to dynamize a space through composition or use rigidity as a vector for dramaturgical meaning. One comes to welcome those obvious moments of visual symbolism like the flag, the dead bodies at Lisbet’s nursing home jobs, or the ice collapse. They’re blunt, but they’re doing something. They have oomph.
It’s not incompetent work, mind you. Mungiu has enough great work to back him up as a master of cinema. It’s merely uninspired, and a bitter disappointment after stuff like R.M.N.’s Wiseman-esque town hall and surreal bear attack, the paradoxical claustrophobia of open spaces in Beyond the Hills, the marathon takes of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or the playfulness of shorts like Zapping. This flatness joins the flat character construction, the sabotaged human drama, the failed neutrality of dysfunctional elision that actively stops us from considering the supposed moral grayness at play. And look, after similar cases affecting Portuguese immigrants across Europe, I was ready to feel some kinship to the family’s cause, troubling as that might have seemed.
After all, making this about anti-Christian prejudice is closer to the right-wing propagandist spin on the Bodnariu case than its root cause. Xenophobia is the main thing here, and it should’ve been the main avenue through which to examine the hypocrisy of the supposed progressives. That he doesn’t do that is a missed chance to actually cut deep where he could. The same goes for the opportunism of the culture war types, whose relationship to Mihai is barely sketched beyond a welcome to frigid Norway. His complicity is another unknown quantity that Stan’s performance might hint at, but the text refuses to support. Why are they so minimized if Mungiu still felt compelled to include that part of the real-life tale in this fictionalized account?
Fjord wants to have a dialogue with the audience. Still, it errs on the side of lecturing them while proclaiming to be doing no such thing, like a preacher delivering a sermon but alleging to be some researcher serving you a Rorschach test. It’s nearly two and a half deathly dull hours with no nuance or productive ambiguities in sight. It’s also audiovisually insipid in ways that won’t stop those cinematography accounts from celebrating the occasional good shot on social media, but it solicits little, if any, serious discussion. Then why did I call it a conversation starter up top, you might ask. Because Eurocheese and I, who’d never met in person before, spent over an hour outside, shit-talking this thing to high heavens, after our screening. So, I guess that qualifies on a technicality.
As one of NEON’s awards season priorities, we’ll be hearing about Fjord for months to come. It’s also, of course, Romania’s official submission for the Best International Film Oscar, a race it was already qualified for due to its Palme. After TIFF, it’ll play NYFF and Mill Valley before launching its commercial release on October 9th.
Reader Comments (1)
To be fair, we had a great time shit-talking it.