“Fjord” Keeps the Faith

The evangelical Christian is trained early and often in the art of calling attention to their faith, in ways that might risk the irritation—but also pique the curiosity—of a nonbeliever. As a teen-ager, reared in a Baptist church and eager to win souls for Christ, I strategically thrust God into every secular context I could manage, hopeful that conversations might lead to conversions. A friend and I foisted an a-cappella duet of “Hide Me in the Shelter” on our twelfth-grade English class; I still find that praise song beautiful and moving, though it wouldn’t make my karaoke list today. As a college freshman, I walked around campus wearing an “I ❤ JESUS” keychain lanyard. At my first job, I snuck a Scripture verse into a thank-you note to my boss. I look back on these earnest gestures now with the embarrassment of a repentant ex-vangelical, having long ago determined that Jesus’ promise to make us “fishers of men” did not require us to dangle our beliefs like bait. God is love, and love isn’t a booby trap.

If there’s one thing the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu nails in his knotty and engrossing new film, “Fjord,” it’s how the evangelical impulse manifests itself in public—and how swiftly, even reflexively, it can be shut down. The film unfolds during an unusually fraught winter for Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve), a Christian couple who have just moved with their five children from Bucharest to a tiny village on the Norwegian coast. Lisbet works as a nurse at an elder-care facility; Mihai, a trained engineer, has just been hired as an I.T. technician at the local high school, where their two oldest kids, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), are newly enrolled. Spying an electronic keyboard in the school lunchroom one day, Mihai begins serenading the crowd with “Amazing Grace,” only to be interrupted by a sharp-eared administrator, Frida (Lisa Loven Kongsli), who asks him to play something more cheerful. Never mind that “Amazing Grace” can, in fact, be extremely cheerful, especially if you make it to that heavenly roar of a final stanza (“When we’ve been there ten thousand years”). There’s no mistaking the real warning in Frida’s words: keep your goddam religion to yourself.

The Gheorghius will learn that lesson the hard way. Their relocation marks a homecoming of sorts for Lisbet, who’s Norwegian; she met Mihai while serving as a missionary in Romania. This is not, to put it mildly, the marriage story in which you’d think to cast two stars as radiant and Oscar-nominated as Reinsve and Stan, but the actors’ instincts are shrewd, and so are Mungiu’s. Within the mode of ascetic art-house realism that he practices, all workaday locations and harsh lighting, a carefully modulated flash of star power can be a beacon for the audience’s sympathies. Reinsve and Stan have in fact played a couple before, in the science-fiction thriller-comedy “A Different Man” (2024). In that film, Stan wore a mass of disfiguring prosthetics; he’s only slightly less recognizable as Mihai, a bald schlub with thick-rimmed glasses and a seasonally apt wardrobe of ugly sweaters. He’s a man of little personality but steely convictions, and Stan, a dreamboat thoroughly deglamorized, gives him an imposingly gloomy, grizzled presence.

Reinsve, though more tamped down than she was in “The Worst Person in the World” (2021) and “Sentimental Value” (2025), makes Lisbet an easier figure to embrace than Mihai. For a while, you sense her joy at being back on Scandinavian soil—closer to her relatives, and with every expectation of an easier, more prosperous life ahead. Mungiu, working with the cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru, employs a familiar visual strategy of wide-screen compositions and uninterrupted long takes to ground us in the quotidian rhythms and crisscrossing relationships of a close-knit community. The Gheorghius’ next-door neighbor, Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth), is also the high-school headmaster. Lisbet sometimes looks after Mats’s ailing father, Åke (Øyvind Venstad Kjeksrud), and recommends him for the senior home where she works.

Before long, though, the family’s warm reception has turned as cold and rocky as the avalanches that occur with alarming regularity in the vicinity. One morning at school, Frida spies bruises on Elia’s back and overhears her and Emmanuel talking about having been disciplined by their parents. Child-protective services is summoned, and Mihai and Lisbet stand accused of physically abusing their kids, charges that they deny vehemently, to no avail. With dizzying speed and less-than-rigorous due process, all five of the Gheorghiu children—including the youngest, who’s still breastfeeding—are taken away and placed into foster care.

Mungiu craftily plants the seed of this crisis in his opening shot, set in the aftermath of a stinging act of parental discipline. Although we witness no blows, verbal or physical, Father clearly doesn’t always know best. Do the Gheorghius beat their children? Does a smack on the bottom—or an angry, ostensibly protective shove away from a hot stove—constitute a beating? Does the Romanian word for “beat” mean the same thing in Norwegian and English equivalents? These and other questions proliferate as Lisbet and Mihai are interrogated by social workers and attorneys, who treat them with bureaucratic dismissiveness at best and sneering condescension at worst. Amid a confusing clash of testimonies and languages, it emerges that, sometime before the abuse allegations were made, one of the Gheorghiu kids was overheard calling homosexuality a sin, setting off warning bells among the school staff. You can blanch at the family’s homophobia without seeing it as grounds for a prison sentence, the possibility of which looms as criminal proceedings are set in motion. Unsurprisingly, Mihai and Lisbet begin to wonder whether they are being tried for child abuse or for their refusal to assimilate the progressive, secular-humanist values of their new home country—in other words, for their Christianity.

With his cool narrative restraint and ominous powers of observation, Mungiu is often compared to the Austrian master Michael Haneke, whose austere formalism has long struck me as the most influential sensibility in twenty-first-century art-house cinema. Mungiu may have a less sadistic streak and a more active camera, but the two filmmakers share a particular commitment to narrative indeterminacy, devising intricate yet incomplete crime-story plots that function broadly as sociopolitical allegories. The moral puzzle presented in “Fjord” bears echoes of Haneke’s films “Caché” (2005) and “The White Ribbon” (2009), two grim mysteries with nary a clear solution between them. All three films are fundamentally tales of generational discontent, keenly attuned to the vast chasms that can open between parents and children.

Mungiu, immersing us fully in Lisbet and Mihai’s nightmare, turns that gap into a structuring principle. The children, once they are gone, remain almost entirely offscreen, returning only for rare supervised visits. During one such meeting, the two older kids, Elia and Emmanuel, project an eerie calm; they’re eager to return home to their parents, yet also reticent in a way that suggests a sliver of filial reproach. Owing to their limited screen time, we never hear them comment, even in private, on their parents’ innocence or guilt—an elision that, as the story gathers steam, comes to feel like an evasion. Elsewhere, Mungiu shuffles perspectives with relative freedom: we eavesdrop on Mats’s conversations with school colleagues, and also his occasional arguments with his wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), a kind-hearted attorney who feels for the Gheorghius. The effect of Mungiu’s multi-stranded approach is, perhaps paradoxically, one of God-like omniscience, which makes the children’s silence on the matter at hand all the more jarring—ambiguity taken to the point of coyness.

“Fjord” won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (an award Mungiu previously won in 2007, for his masterly Ceaușescu-era thriller, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”). Since then, several critics have called out what they see as an even more pernicious form of vacillation on the director’s part. With “Fjord,” they contend, he has drifted into a mealy-mouthed political both-sides-ism that holds the left to be as susceptible as the right to the traps of ignorance, groupthink, and racial and religious discrimination. The story is loosely based on the actual case, from 2015, of Marius and Ruth Bondariu, a Romanian Norwegian couple whose five children were taken into state custody in Norway, sparking global outrage. Real-life inspiration, of course, is no guarantee of artistic credibility, and the term that keeps arising in conversations that I’ve had about “Fjord” is “straw man,” the implication being that the film exaggerates and demonizes the overreach of the Scandinavian welfare state to the point of absurdity

To which I can only answer that I’ve seen “Fjord” twice now, and the generalizations that its critics seem eager to ascribe to it strike me as fundamentally at odds with the angularity, specificity, and darkly comic pungency of Mungiu’s telling. His laserlike focus on the particulars of the story doesn’t leave much room for extrapolation; even the infuriating case of bureaucratic overreach that the film depicts can easily be understood, and perhaps even defended, as an aberration. The only both-sides-ism Mungiu subscribes to, as far as I can tell, is a willingness to hold up a mirror to his own work: “Fjord” is a logical companion to “R.M.N.,” his drama from 2022, which took place in a small, impoverished Transylvanian town that revolted against the arrival of three Sri Lankan migrant workers. There’s no moral equivalency between a social-services branch and a xenophobic mob, but they do share an unjustified fear of contamination—a desire to purge obvious outsiders from their ranks.

Is “Fjord” guilty, as some have charged, of stacking the moral decks in the Gheorghius’ favor? We are presented with a few potentially hissable villains, including an attorney for the state (Christian Rubeck) who mocks the Gheorghius’ faith and a frostily inflexible social worker, Gunda (Ellen Dorrit Petersen). Yet Mungiu has an uncommon ability to temper bluntness with nuance. You wince when Mihai angrily accuses Gunda of abusing her power over other people’s children because she has none of her own, and you believe her when she speaks of the tough but necessary work that her agency does, of the children who, through its interventions, have been spared additional trauma and harm. Whatever measure of contempt the film harbors toward its minor characters, it reserves perhaps even harsher judgment for its protagonists. Few directors are better than Mungiu at capturing the non-wisdom of crowds, and every glimpse of the Gheorghius in communion with other Christians throws off an air of mass-smiling menace. Their right to practice their religion is as incontestable, in Mungiu’s view, as his right to despise it is.

There are two characters who entirely escape Mungiu’s censure: Mia, the kindly next-door neighbor, and her daughter, Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), who bonds with Elia at school. Together, mother and daughter bear out one of Mungiu’s sharpest points, namely that we need not be instinctually repelled by the other, and that certain ideological polarities might, in a better world, resolve themselves in a spirit of mutual curiosity. Although Noora is a typically rebellious teen-ager, she’s more intrigued than put off by the faith-based structures and disciplines that Mihai and Lisbet have imposed on their kids. Noora ends up falling in love with Elia, and Mungiu, not for the first time, treats the close bond between two young women as a profoundly disruptive force for good, a moral alliance that threatens orthodoxies of every kind. In “4 Months,” a woman helps her friend secure an illegal abortion; in “Beyond the Hills” (2012), a forbidden lesbian relationship is sacrificed on the altar of religious oppression. In “Fjord,” Noora’s passion for Elia is like a subversive riff on the greatest of Biblical decrees: love thy neighbor.

Mia fulfills that commandment in a more platonic sense, delivering, despite her own secular attitudes, the film’s single most compassionate and Christlike gesture: in her capacity as an attorney, she bravely agrees to defend Mihai and Lisbet in court when it seems that no one else will. You might describe “Fjord” as a search for evidence of things not seen: while child-protective services seeks proof of a parent’s vicious slap, Mungiu finds something transcendent in a nonbeliever’s genuinely nervy act of faith. That’s why, when Mia announces her decision, the camera seems to embrace her with an almost palpable passion—a sense of joyous relief that feels entirely absent from, say, the dreary footage of the Gheorghius’ church meetings. In another gesture of kindness, Mia attends one such gathering, and although her would-be converters put her on the spot, it is the humble outsider, unsurprisingly, whom Mungiu sees fit to grant the final word. “I don’t know what to say,” Mia says, but then she does: “I believe we all have a lot to learn from everything that’s happened.” ♦