Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) are immigrants to Norway, where Lisbet was born. They have arrived with their five children, two in their teens, to be closer to Lisbet's family and to evangelize their Christian faith in the process.
Mihai is of a different culture, and his parenting reflects that. In Romania, it is less uncommon to be more forceful with your children. As the film begins, we're in the minutes after one such punishment, though Mungiu does not show us anything beyond the aftermath, as Mihai comforts his daughter.
One day, a teacher notices one of the teenagers is bruised. It is never told how the bruises got there, though the film makes a point to indicate it isn't through parental violence. In an instant, the busybodies in the faculty begin an investigation, and within days, the children are taken away by the state.
Mihai and Lisbet are told in no uncertain terms that their behavior, especially all this religious stuff, is the root cause. Now, they must prove their fitness to keep their children. Otherwise, the kids will be sent to live with foster families, and the family will be torn apart for good.
Their torment unfolds like a Kafkaesque nightmare. The police bully Mihai for a written statement that he beats his children, their lawyer openly mocks them before abandoning them in the middle of their lawsuit, and everyone, as if taken by Body Snatchers, agrees upon a method to punish them for their faith.
In one scene, Mihai wanders into the cafeteria and plays a few chords of 'Amazing Grace'. He is immediately stopped and told not to evangelize in the school. The other teachers smugly gather to assert how this society has no place for religion like that.
But religion is taught in schools in Norway. Confirmation camps, both religious and non-denominational ones, are a coming-of-age ritual. Traditional hymns are commonplace, especially during holidays. There are major Christian festivals and events all over the country every year. By and large, it is like the other Nordic countries, including my own, where Christianity is the unspoken, silent majority.
In Mungiu's world, Norway is run by secular extremists who weaponize empathy and bureaucracy to punish outsiders. In one grotesque sequence, a wailing mother demands to know how someone who has no children would know what it means to lose one. In response, a cartoonishly evil social worker (complete with a pixie cut and sneer) proudly declares that it doesn't matter that she's childless. After all, the state has given her all the training she needs.
In the heat of the moment, anger makes perfect emotional sense as a response. Only a parent knows what it feels like to be a parent. But what does that say about those who cannot have children yet raise others nonetheless? Is the implication that this is state-sanctioned bullying in the name of rationalist extremism? Is it a one-off scenario in some remote town with no law to speak of? As the lawyers prove the charges are bogus and the trial continues, are we meant to take it as an example of corruption on a countrywide scale?
Mungiu doesn't say, nor does he attempt to, either. Instead, Fjord takes a baseline of things we can agree upon as a society and winds it to an extreme, where a Romanian family of Christians is persecuted for their ways. What makes this worse is that Mungiu is a talented director and writer. His cast is uniformly excellent. But it is all in service of something that doesn't have a clear idea of what it wants to attack.
This is a film that intentionally refuses to provide the audience with clear answers, definitions, or conclusions. While Mihai and Lisbet are clearly meant to elicit empathy in the face of overwhelming odds, Mungiu directs Stan and Reinsve to closed-off and hard-to-like performances that repel even as we want them to win out of principle. But if the ultimate statement is that everything is broken, it makes for less compelling viewing.
This makes for a frustrating experience, because it is clear that Mungiu's talents lie in forcing us to confront complexities and shades of grey. Mihai admits that his parenting involves "slaps" on the butt and a degree of physicality. We see awkward demonstrations of what this could mean, and Mungiu does not demand that the audience agree or disagree on whether it's good parenting. In fact, he presents a form of emotional violence in the very next scene that comes at the hands of those claiming to be above this kind of behavior.
But I would argue that Mungiu goes so far in his attempt to remain distant that Fjord loses its grasp on what it wants to say. In one baffling scenario, a lawyer representing Norway's child welfare system asks Mihai if he knows of an old Romanian saying that could be read as permission to hit your children. When Mihai says he does, the lawyer smugly asks if that's why Mihai beats his, and whether he would beat the lawyer – a grown man – instead.
Perhaps this scene is there to emphasize that Kafkaesque nightmare. But it plays out so big and broad that, for a Nordic viewer like myself, it felt closer to Kabuki theater than anything else. To Mungiu's credit, some moments hint, even subtly, that while religion is the easiest route to this persecution, xenophobia and racism are the fuel that propel this engine. But I can't help but wonder what this film would look like if the family at its heart weren't Christian, but of any other religion?
Perhaps Mungiu intends to highlight how little even familiarity matters when extremism is at play. It certainly feels that way as the trial progresses, and Mihai and Lisbet must provide an answer for every attack on their personal beliefs.
There are genuine issues in the Nordic countries. We're a cold, isolated, and difficult people who, if bureaucracy didn't exist, would invent it solely so we'd have something to do. There is no need to invent things to discuss problems that already exist. Even if it is meant in earnest, it only muddies the waters.
When Mihai alerts his native country of their distress, Romania sends delegates and news teams to help. Even here, Mungiu goes for the obvious and centrist approach. The teams are ultimately there to help themselves and their ultra-conservative cause. Mihai, helpless and naive, refuses to engage, even as he's asked point-blank about the matter. Everyone is bad on both sides, Mungiu says, and perhaps even that is with a degree of non-committedness.
As the torment goes to court, Mungiu abandons all semblance of realism. When Mihai and Lisbet ask how the child protective services can do all this, everyone just shrugs and says they can do what they want. It's meant to be upsetting, but it's so absurd, especially to anyone who has seen how slow bureaucracies are in this part of the world, that it fails to register. Even if these entities were this evil, they are not this efficient.
Fjord is a well-directed feature. Mungiu is incapable of delivering anything but quality in this regard. But his script is too big and too small at all once, and the attempt to paint an image of a remote village that somehow still represents an entire country is foolhardy. Still, both Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve give tremendous performances that make the result watchable and, at times, even intriguing. It is in the moments where Mungiu's writing fails them that Fjord proves most frustrating. It reminds us that not even pristine acting or talented directing can survive an aimless script.
Perhaps Fjord is meant to be surrealist. Maybe it is just a fable, and my expectations are unjust, because it doesn't strive for realism. Yet it consistently points at the world and expresses its frustrations at how broken things are. But if its examples are twisted and intentionally exaggerated reflections, then I wonder what the correct reaction is?
