Cristian Mungiu's 'Fjord' Places Norwegian Child Welfare on Trial

Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and set for an October 9 theatrical release through NEON, stages a culture-versus-law showdown over a Romanian family whose five children are seized by Norwegian authorities for spanking.

The film follows Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), a Norwegian nurse, and Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan), a Romanian aeronautical engineer, who relocate with their seven-person family from Bucharest to a seaside village on a western Norwegian fjord. Writer-director Mungiu, whose last two features Graduation and R.M.N. targeted the pitfalls of Romania's traditional society, here reverses the lens: the devout evangelical Christian family becomes the minority under pressure from a progressive state.

The mechanism is simple and brutal. After a teacher suspects the children have been spanked, Child Protective Services arrives unannounced and takes all five into custody pending investigation. The parents admit to occasional spanking. The children confirm it. The question then transforms, as The Film Stage's review notes: should parents be allowed to do this, and should the punishment be the legal seizure of their children for the remainder of their youth? The film refuses to answer a darker question for its audience — at what point does spanking become beating?

What does this change for Mungiu's career?

The review calls Fjord "a triumphant film that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us, regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three," and marks it a Critics' Pick. It also names the film the most aesthetically pleasing of Cannes thus far, crediting cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru and colorist Andu Radu — the same pairing behind R.M.N. in 2022 — whose chilly sky-blue palette masks the region in a beauty the review finds hard to appreciate amid the operation of its society.

Reinsve and Stan play the conservative matriarch and patriarch, in the review's words, "with a gentle, hushed desperation, quaking in the wake of losing their five children forever as if they already have."

A trial the film refuses to referee

Civil and criminal trials hang over the couple. CPS keeps postponing the internationally publicized civil case in hopes the criminal trial — which will almost certainly find them guilty under Norwegian legislation — goes first. Their defense comes from an unlikely source: Mia (Lisa Carlehed), a liberal atheist neighbor whose rebellious daughter influences the eldest children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu). Mia finds the state's stance harsh and damaging given that the children want to go home, the parents have promised never to spank again, and they didn't know they were committing a crime. Her strategy takes a religious-persecution angle.

The review, reprinted from The Film Stage's Cannes coverage, is blunt about both sides. The Gheorghius' "poised stance against homosexuality is abominable, their casual tendency to spank their children a reprehensible relic of generations past." Yet the film argues they deserve liberties and a proper defense from Norwegian powers the review describes as flown "so close to the sun of liberalism that they've begun to burn the minorities who live there." Mihai puts it more curtly: "They never had communism."

Mungiu visualizes the standoff through avalanches cascading behind the port town and a CPS apparatus rendered clinical to the point of inhumanity — one representative argues there's no evidence children are better off with non-abusive biological parents than agreeable foster parents. Against that cold machinery, the parents' strict rules read as something teenagers merely mature past, and Mungiu shows how easily Elia and Emmanuel break those rules under peer pressure from Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen).

One consolation belongs to the state: a courtroom hovering over the fjord with floor-to-ceiling windows and the mountains glowing behind every shot.

At nearly two and a half hours, the film, per the review, proceeds as if 30 minutes, with the verdicts in both cases pulsing with tension to an ending that "will have you falling off the edge of your seat."