‘Fjord’ Review: A Quiet Family Drama That Dares You to Pick a Side

‘Fjord’ arrives in theaters through Neon with a Palme d’Or already on its résumé, giving Cristian Mungiu a second win at Cannes after ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ in 2007. The film stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a devout couple who move with their five children to a remote Norwegian coastal town. It runs two hours and twenty six minutes, and it never once raises its voice.

Mihai is a Romanian aeronautical engineer and Lisbet is a Norwegian born nurse returning to her home turf. Mungiu lets the family settle in and be welcomed before anything cracks. Then their teenage daughter Elia turns up at school with bruises, and a teacher’s concern sets the child protection system in motion.

I came out of ‘Fjord’ admiring it far more than I enjoyed it, which feels like the correct response to a film this uncomfortable. Mungiu, who wrote the script as well, loosely builds the story on the real case of the Bodnariu family, renamed here, whose children were removed by Norwegian authorities. He shoots with handheld cameras and no music at all, so every dinner table exchange and every awkward silence has to carry the weight a score normally would.

Stan is nearly unrecognisable as Mihai, a reserved man who absorbs every humiliation without a flinch. Reinsve plays Lisbet as a closed door, warm in flashes but deliberately opaque once the pressure arrives. Neither performance asks for your sympathy, and that restraint is exactly why the film keeps you leaning forward trying to read them.

The setting does a lot of quiet work too. The subdued palette, the mountains looming over a handful of houses and the cold water beside them make this small community feel beautiful and unforgiving in the same breath. It is a place where kindness arrives with a slice of cake and suspicion arrives with a clipboard.

The courtroom stretch is where I felt the film strain. Procedural scenes run long, and the silences that built dread so well early on begin to feel like withholding rather than tension. Ellen Dorrit Petersen’s child protection head is drawn so coldly, and one removal scene tips so far into the absurd, that Mungiu’s supposedly even handed scales start to wobble.

My bigger frustration is the children. Once they are taken from their parents, the film nearly forgets them, and the very people at the heart of the dispute fade from view just when their perspective matters most. For a story about who gets to decide what is best for a child, that absence feels like a real miss.

Still, ‘Fjord’ is the kind of drama that follows you out of the cinema and into the argument you have on the bus home. With two disciplined performances and a setting you can almost feel on your skin, I forgave a great deal of its tilt and its sagging court scenes. My verdict is 8 out of 10.

Do you agree with my verdict on ‘Fjord’, and did you side with the Gheorghius or with the system by the end, so tell me in the comments?