Fjord – Sydney Film Festival Review
Few contemporary filmmakers are as adept at confronting audiences with uncomfortable truths as Romanian director Cristian Mungiu who has built a career examining the moral contradictions that exist beneath the surface of modern European society. With Fjord, Mungiu once again crafts a film that raises difficult questions (of those not used to being interrogated) without offering easy answers (despite how easily the system wants to dismiss legitimate critique), producing an intellectually provocative and emotionally compelling drama that wrestles with themes of personal freedom, unconscious bias, and cultural acceptance.
Set within the seemingly picturesque but increasingly fractured social landscape of contemporary Norway, Fjord follows the Gheorghiu family as they find themselves entangled in a conflict that exposes deep tensions between individual liberty and the demands of an ostensibly tolerant secular society.
Having recently relocated to the national home of their matriarch Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), her husband Romanian born Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and their 5 children begin to settle into Norwegian life. But their intercultural family is quickly pulled into a rapidly escalating intercultural conflict when their children are forcibly taken from school by child protective services due to concerns of child abuse relating to physical disciplinary punishment like spanking.
While Fjord certainly raises questions about the Gheorghiu family and their choices, these concerns are answered early with clarity and conviction. Which allows Mungiu’s greater fascination to develop elsewhere. The film’s most unsettling examination is reserved for the institutions and social structures surrounding them. It interrogates this secular liberal order that prides itself on tolerance and progressiveness, while simultaneously demanding conformity, assimilation, and submission from those who fail to fit comfortably within its assumptions and the resulting tensions expose forms of prejudice that often masquerade as openness and acceptance. There are no villains twirling moustaches and no simplistic heroes. Yet neither does Mungiu retreat into a false moral equivalency.
Some critics have characterised the film as an even-handed balancing act between opposing worldviews, as though the director is presenting both sides with equal sympathy. That reading feels incomplete.
Rather it is the films courage in critiquing a seemingly enlightened and progressive worldview that makes Fjord so compelling. Rather than reassuring certain audiences of their moral enlightenment, Mungiu forces them to confront the possibility that their ideals may be compromised, ineffective, or even harmful. The film’s most uncomfortable moments emerge from characters who genuinely believe themselves to be compassionate and all-loving, yet whose actions reveal unconscious biases and hypocritical, abusive, traumatic and cruel contradictions. In that sense, Fjord becomes less an attack on liberalism itself than a challenge to the complacency and self-congratulation that can accompany it.
Like much of Mungiu’s work, Fjord unfolds with long takes, naturalistic dialogue, and carefully observed performances that create an atmosphere of authenticity that allows the film’s ethical and philosophical questions to emerge organically. Sebastian Stan delivers some of the finest work of his career, bringing a quiet dignity and emotional complexity to Mihai as he navigates impossible circumstances in a country not his own, whilst Renate Reinsve proves equally outstanding, capturing the vulnerability and strength of a woman caught between her culture, faith and family. Together, they anchor the film with performances that feel embodied and profoundly authentic. The rest of the ensemble play their parts with deep conviction even when they teeter on self-parody or self-righteousness.
Thoughtful, courageous, and deeply unsettling, Fjord is a triumphant film that refuses to flatter its audience and is all the more powerful because of it. It’s an examination of what multiculturalism, progress, and acceptance truly mean when they collide with competing values and deeply held convictions. The questions raised by Fjord will continue to rattle around the audience’s minds. And that is precisely the point. The film is designed not to provide comforting answers, but to provoke reflection and conversation about cultural literacy, tolerance, and the hidden assumptions that shape contemporary society and the legitimacy of worldviews some may demean as uncultured or in need of change.
Fjord screened at the 2026 Sydney Film Festival.
