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FUCKNEWS
Fjord
2026 • 146 min

Fjord

Cristian Mungiu
4.5
This movie was screened on
Rome Film Fest
Drama
🤍 IMDb

Synopsis

 Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a deeply religious Romanian-Norwegian couple, move with their five children to a small village in Norway, where they encounter an apparently welcoming community. The children befriend their neighbours’ children, but the educational and cultural differences that initially seem reconcilable gradually become a source of suspicion. When bruises are noticed on the body of Elia, their teenage daughter, at school, an investigation into the family’s child-rearing practices begins. What follows is an increasingly tense confrontation between religious beliefs, conceptions of childhood and institutional authority, one that calls into question not only the fate of a family, but also the criteria by which a society determines what is acceptable and what is not. 

Review

7 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice · 19. October 2026
 
Knowledge humanizes men, and reason makes them gentler, but prejudices eradicate every disposition towards tenderness.
Montesquieu 

“There are no Draculas here.” It is with this remark that Fjord opens its moral universe: the school principal welcomes the newly arrived children with a reassurance intended to sound humorous, friendly, even inclusive. But what makes such a joke possible? What imagery does it evoke, what cultural distance does it presuppose, what prejudice might it conceal behind its cordiality? In just a few moments, Cristian Mungiu introduces one of the film’s fundamental questions: the far from obvious boundary between what we consider normal and what we do not. Even hospitality, then, can contain an unconscious sense of superiority. 

From this point onwards, over 146 minutes that unfold with remarkable tension, Fjord subjects the viewer to an exercise in intellectual instability. Each scene seems to offer sufficient grounds for forming a judgement, only to introduce further elements that undermine its certainty. This is not simply a matter of observing a conflict between two cultures, but of discovering how difficult it is to escape our own when we presume to judge another. 

The Gheorghius are a large family governed by a strict religiosity that structures everyday life, disciplines behaviour and grants the Bible decisive authority. Mihai, an aeronautical engineer, applies the same meticulousness to raising his children that seems to define his work, almost as if he were programming software. Lisbet, who grew up in Norway, is devoted to caring for others and also works with the bodies of the deceased before burial. Strict discipline and selfless dedication coexist within this family, as do a system of rules that may appear repressive and a tangible concern for others. Mungiu neither erases these contradictions nor arranges them into a reassuring hierarchy. He allows them to exist, leaving the viewer to grapple with them. 

When suspicions arise that the children have been physically punished, the family’s system of beliefs collides with that of the society in which it now lives. The authorities are called upon to intervene, child protection becomes a public concern, and what happens within the home ceases to belong exclusively to the private sphere. Yet the transition from concern to investigation, and from investigation to condemnation, is not as straightforward as we might like to believe. 

Mungiu does not turn these questions into an investigation with a predetermined solution. His aim is not to deliver a definitive verdict, but to make pronouncing one increasingly difficult. The tension arises precisely from this suspension: the viewer is constantly pushed to take a position, yet denied the comfort of a perspective that would make doubt unnecessary. The film thus becomes a device for moral inquiry in which no one can simply observe the conflict from the outside. Viewers, too, must answer for their own reactions, immediate associations and the categories they employ without having examined their underlying assumptions. 

The point is not to claim that every judgement is illegitimate, nor that all positions are equally valid. Religious beliefs do not automatically make the child-rearing practices that may derive from them acceptable; likewise, invoking rights and child protection does not automatically render those responsible for enforcing them infallible. There is a difference between recognising the need to assess conduct and presuming that one possesses, by virtue of one’s cultural background, a standard immune to revision. It is precisely in this distinction that Fjord locates its most unsettling territory. 
The Gheorghiu family brings with it a universe of values in which parental authority, obedience and discipline are legitimized by a religious order. The Norwegian community, by contrast, identifies with a system that upholds individual freedom, children’s rights and institutional responsibility. The conflict therefore appears to be a clash between tradition and modernity, faith and secularism, a conservative and a progressive model of education. But Mungiu undermines the very convenience of this opposition: when progressivism ceases to question its own assumptions, it can become a doctrine just as impervious to doubt; and a society that considers itself emancipated from religious dogma is not necessarily immune to other unquestioned assumptions. 

As the film suggests, fundamentalism does not necessarily lie in the content of a belief. It may also lie in our relationship with that belief: in the claim that our principles are self-evident and beyond question, that our idea of the good is sufficiently grounded to authorize us to determine what is good for others. Religious fundamentalism exists, but so does a secular rigidity that, despite invoking different values, can reproduce the same structure: a truth taken for granted, a system of belonging, a clear distinction between those who are right and those who must be corrected, restrained or excluded. 

Moral superiority is all the harder to recognize when it presents itself as a virtue. Those who consider themselves guardians of reason do not perceive themselves as harbouring prejudice, because they identify their own perspective with neutrality itself. 

This is where Fjord acquires its distinctly philosophical dimension. The question is not merely what is right, but where our idea of justice comes from. Not merely what is true, but what conditions allow us to recognize something as true. And, ultimately, what authorizes us to judge. 

The film does not invite us to suspend all evaluation in a kind of absolute relativism. Such a conclusion would merely be another shortcut, the easiest way to evade the responsibility of making distinctions. What it calls into question is the automatic leap from adhering to a principle to believing that we already possess all the answers required to apply it. Between relativism, which dissolves every distinction, and dogmatism, which claims to have resolved them all, there remains a more uncomfortable space: that of scrutiny, verification and a willingness to question even the convictions that seem most firmly established. 

The film’s tension feeds on precisely this space. Its length never feels burdensome because each development adds another element of uncertainty, continually shifting the vantage point from which we observe events. Mungiu’s rigorous direction, reluctant to offer easy release, prevents viewers from retreating into the reassuring distance of those watching someone else’s story. The issue is no longer confined to the Romanian-Norwegian family, its beliefs or the procedures of the authorities. It extends to anyone who has ever mistaken familiarity with a rule for proof of its validity, or belonging to a culture for a guarantee of superiority. 

The opposition between the two cultural worlds is disrupted by Noora, the school principal’s daughter, through the relationship she develops with Elia and Emmanuel. The friendship and attraction between the teenagers introduce a perspective different from that of the adults: educational and religious differences do not disappear, but neither do they prevent closeness or necessarily determine how each person sees the other. Their relationship puts the categories through which their respective families interpret the world to the test. 

Another rupture emerges with the suicide, which forces Lisbet to confront a reality that is difficult to reconcile with her religious worldview. If life is a sacred gift, how can one understand the decision to renounce it? Through her work caring for people as they approach death, Lisbet accompanies others at the end of their lives, yet she now faces a contradiction that faith cannot automatically resolve. This development, too, unsettles the apparent stability of convictions: adhering to a system of values does not mean that every experience can be explained within it. 

Fjord connects with R.M.N. by the same director, in which suspicion towards outsiders reveals how collective identity is constructed through prejudice and belonging, and with Lars von Trier’s Dogville, which exposes the violence concealed beneath a community’s presumed virtue. Fjord takes the question a step further: it challenges not only prejudice directed at others, but also the conviction that one has freed oneself from it. For the most insidious prejudice may be precisely that of those who are convinced they have overcome it. 

Mungiu’s great achievement is to leave open the question from which everything begins: when we judge others, what criteria do we use, and what entitles us to regard those criteria as unquestionable? It is this question, more than any answer, that gives Fjord its shape. 

There is no prejudice stronger than that which arises from the conviction that one is free of it.
William Hazlitt 


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