Toronto 2026 Review: FJORD, Palme D'Or Winner Finds Many Arthouse Audience Buttons to Push

Roger Ebert once described film as a “machine that generates empathy.” For writer-director Christian Mugiu, this is very much true. But what if that empathy was slyly and sharply weaponized into a provocation?

Enter Fjord.

 

In our increasingly globalized (and polarized) world, the opportunities for mis-communication, mis-understanding and social dogmas have never been more ripe for abuse. Fjord quietly, practically inevitably, goes for the jugular of the very arthouse audience that would be his core audience.

 

This is Micheal Haneke kind of stuff, but filtered through the ‘eat the elite’ sensibilities of Ruben Östlund, with all the language barriers and procedural nightmares of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of A Fall. As all of these directors, including Mungiu (both for Fjord and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) have won the Palme D’Or, it is perhaps an indication that there is something quite specific in the sensibilities (or champagne) of recent Cannes’ juries.

Fjord follows the Gheorghiu family as they emmigrate from Romania to Norway. Not the big city of Oslo, but rather a tiny island-fishing town in the far north. Mihai haș secured an IT job at the high school through contacts in their church. Lisbet was born Norwegian, and returns with her family to her hometown to work as a nurse. Mihai and their five children, aged from high-school to infant, speak very little Norwegian.

 

English functions as a temporary bridge-language as they settle into the picturesque and eponymous landscape (the film was shot over several seasons in Hjørundfjorden) of their new lives, while Lisbet has no living family members remaining in the town, which has considerably progressed, via the countries wealth and social programmes, in her time abroad.

 

They are welcomed wholeheartedly and eased in the town via their new neighbours, Mia and Mats, a lawyer on temporary leave looking after her disabled father, and the high school principal. The contrast between Mia and Mats’ hot-tempered and rebellious daughter Noora, compared to the quiet and obedient Gheorghiu kids, is stark. Noora takes a quick liking towards the eldest daughter, Elia. Noora nudges Elia to sneak outside the authority of her parents for nighttime sojourns, whilst Elia nudges Noora to adopt some spirituality and scripture into her life.

 

This all seems harmless enough in this highly tolerant Norwegian moment, until it most decidedly is not. The school’s lounge does not approve of Mihai playing a religious hymn on the electronic keyboard on his lunch break, and the hospital makes a pointed remark to Lisbet not to proselytize towards patients in her palliative care.

 

One of Elia’s high school teachers notices that she has some bruises on her back, and brings in Child Welfare Services (and the police) to assess the Gheorghiu’s fitness as parents. They do this very much through a secular lens. Things escalate, although in a very controlled, slow-boil fashion. The intolerance is palpable, even through the formalized decorum (“an unfortunate situation which hopefully will be cleared up soon.”)

 

Mungiu’s work often favours punishing procedural bureaucracy, characters shoe-horned into tight physical apartments, and stray dogs barking somewhere off camera, typically in his homeland of Romania. All of these things are present in Fjord, but it is curiously fresh against the wide open spaces, and the unspoilt mountains and water of northern Scandinavia.

 

The landscape never really becomes the ‘star’ of the show, but rather exists as a contrasting (ironic perhaps?) ‘picturesque’ backdrop, something that nobody acknowledges, as everyone is caught up in their modern everyday struggles. His camera is hand-held, but only so as a slight waver. It is unsettling, in a way that is barely perceptual. The implications of what is happening in the frame demand the main attention. The camera work is cunning, even as metaphors are blunt. (Avalanches abound.)

 

Mungiu also stacks the story with many side plots and kind-of red herrings to further disrupt expectations and easy predictions or conclusions. It is a shaggy screenplay, but the shagginess obfuscates the occasional descent into didacticism, or ‘tell don’t show’ when the film eventually evolves into a courtroom drama, replete with media circus, in the back half.

 

The button pushing here is savage. When the state grimly informs Mihai and Lisbet that they are taking their children (including  their months old infant), the Norwegian flag flaps gently against the outside window. The filmmaking clearly sides with the religious conservatives here, and makes chilling monsters of the state bureaucracy, the prosecuting lawyer and childless child service worker in particular.

 

As a Canadian, echoes of our own residential school system, rife with hubris and cruel certainty, rippled in my thoughts, even though the century and the script totally flipped. The cognitive dissonance of Mungiu’s incitements here is both dizzying and exhilarating, without ever becoming exhausting or rote.

 

This is echoed by incredibly low-key performances from both a nearly unrecognizable Sebastian Stan, who keeps his head down; his posture stiffens to contain the increasing rage at the state’s righteously secular imposition on his beliefs and culture. He pokes logical holes in process which are coldly unaddressed by the institutional workers in a bid to ‘remain calm.’

 

An even more low-key character is essayed by Renate Reinsve, as Lisbet, who knows her truths, but wants to let the process play out in a passive, non-confrontational way. The world is against them, although their immediate neighbours do sympathize and prove surprisingly resourceful, even as they themselves struggle with their own personal hangups and challenges.

Mia steps up as their attorney after the state appointed one abandons them, while Lisbet looks after Mia’s father, who comes out of his shell and offers her naked honesty that he cannot with his own family, intent on institutionalising him. Surprisingly though, the film is not as focused on character -- although the adult actors put a lot of flesh on the bones here, even if the children are abandoned as characters for long stretches of the film -- as one might expect, but rather on the eddies and currents of complex situations, political and personal, and all the contradictions and unexpected silver-linings that result.

Fjord is a difficult watch. It invites cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias and easy dismissal from the audience it will most likely attract. It demands a response, even as it pushes its likely progressive audience away. It is profoundly vital in examining the 21st century culture wars in ways that are both very specific and dangerously empathetic. It absolutely executes on the promise of opening with the church hymn and funeral classic, Amazing Grace.