Films Like ‘Fjord’ That Explore Family, Faith and the Reach of the State
Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner follows a Romanian and Norwegian couple who move with their five children to a fjord village, where scrutiny of their conservative parenting escalates into a crisis after their daughter arrives at school with bruises. Neon releases it in US theaters on October 9.
Anyone looking for movies like ‘Fjord’ will find that it sits at the crossroads of legal drama, family tragedy and cultural conflict. The films below share at least one of those threads, and several were raised by critics who reviewed the film.
‘The Hunt’
Writing for Time Out, a critic found the Mungiu drama redolent of a Danish film in which a kindergarten teacher is accused of child abuse and the words of children are used as cast-iron testimony. The teacher is slowly rebuilding his life after a divorce and custody battle when a little white lie from one of his students threatens to shatter it. The lead actor won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for the role.
‘Anatomy of a Fall’
Euronews Culture said the second half of the Mungiu film brings this French courtroom drama to mind. A husband falls to his death in the wintry French countryside, and a year later his wife, a successful novelist, is on trial for his murder. The trial gradually becomes an unsettling journey into the depths of the couple’s conflicted relationship. It won the Palme d’Or in 2023.
‘R.M.N.’
This is Mungiu’s own earlier look at a community under strain. A few days before Christmas, a man who quit his job in Germany returns to his multi ethnic Transylvanian village, hoping to be more involved in his son’s upbringing. When a few new workers are hired at the local factory, the peace of the community is disturbed and underlying fears erupt through the thin veneer of calm. Euronews Culture noted that the director interrogated xenophobia in this earlier work.
‘Beyond the Hills’
A young woman visits her old boarding school friend at an Orthodox convent in rural Romania, hoping to persuade her to run away. As her behavior deteriorates, the convent’s inhabitants become certain she is possessed and prepare an exorcism. The story is based on a real incident in a Romanian convent in 2005. Mungiu won Best Screenplay at Cannes for it, and the two lead actresses shared the Best Actress award.
‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’
Set in 1987 under the Ceaușescu dictatorship, the film follows two college roommates who seek an illegal abortion for one of them. It recounts twenty four perilous hours in their lives and builds toward an encounter with a menacing abortionist. NPR said it expands from an anguished domestic drama into a portrait of a people. It won the Palme d’Or and remains the film that brought Mungiu international prominence.
‘Graduation’
A physician in a small Transylvanian mountain town has raised his daughter to study abroad, and she has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK. The day before her first written exam she is assaulted, and he must decide how to respond, with every available path breaking the principles he taught her. Mungiu won the Best Director award at Cannes for it in 2016.
‘A Different Man’
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve both appear in this A24 thriller from writer and director Aaron Schimberg. After undergoing facial reconstructive surgery, an outcast becomes fixated on a man who is starring as him in a stage production based on his former life. The film won Schimberg a Silver Bear at the Berlin festival in 2024.
‘Sentimental Value’
Reinsve stars in this Norwegian family drama alongside Stellan Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Her character is a stage actress whose estranged father, a once renowned director, offers her a role in his comeback film, and when she turns it down he gives the part to a young Hollywood star. Joachim Trier’s film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2025.
‘Two Lives’
For twenty years a woman has lived happily with her family in Norway, though she was born in a home for children the Nazis considered Aryan enough to be raised in Germany. A lawyer now wants her to testify against the Norwegian state before the European Court of Justice. Based on a true story, it follows her as the fall of the Berlin Wall forces her to face a secret past with the East German secret police.
‘A Dry White Season’
Donald Sutherland plays a liberal but blinkered schoolteacher in South Africa who gradually becomes radicalized after brutal events affecting his gardener split his family apart. Marlon Brando appears as an anti apartheid lawyer. Roger Ebert’s site described it as a painful examination of one man’s change of conscience. Given how differently these films treat institutions and the families caught inside them, which one do you think comes closest to the moral dilemma at the heart of Mungiu’s Norwegian family drama, and does your answer change depending on whether you side with the parents or the child protection workers?
