Fjord: a long, narrow, deep inlet of the sea between steep mountains or cliffs, especially famous in Norway.

I watched Fjord at The Lark Theater in Larkspur at Mill Valley Film Festival today, it won Cannes Palme d'Or, I thought I'd give it a shot. As it turns out, Palme d'Ors never fail to surprise.

A girl comes home from school with bruises. In most films, that is the start of a mystery. In Cristian Mungiu's film, it is the start of paperwork. Elia Gheorghiu's marks get noticed by teachers. Her brother Emmanuel mentions, in passing, that their mother "punishes" her. The children have already told their classmates, plainly, that they get a light spanking when they misbehave. And so Barnevernet — Norway's child protection service, which operates under a legal duty to report and act — opens a file. Investigators come. The children are questioned. All five of them are removed from the home.

Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu are played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. He is Romanian; she is Norwegian, returning to her hometown — a tiny fishing town in the far north, shot over several seasons in the Hjørundfjorden — with a husband and five children in tow. He got an IT job at the local high school through church contacts. She works as a nurse. The kids range from high-school age down to an infant. They are conservative evangelical Christians: daily Bible study, no video games, no YouTube, no dancing. By every account in the reviews, they are also a close-knit, loving family, well-liked by their neighbors at first.

This is the moral setup. The parents might have hit their daughter; the film never tells you where the bruises came from. It shows you several equally plausible explanations — including one where the kids were roughhousing near their infant brother and Lisbet was trying to stop someone from getting seriously hurt — and then it moves on, because the film is not interested in the bruises. It is interested in what the bruises license.

Mihai barely speaks Norwegian. The investigators question him in a language he does not fully understand, and the film lets you sit in that gap — the most boring, most terrifying gap in the movie — while a man's family is disassembled in words he can't quite parse. The children, whose native language is Romanian, are questioned in Norwegian. The system does not hear these people in their own tongue, and it judges them anyway.

And it only ever hears one side. The teachers' report, the neighbors' account, the caseworkers' notes — each enters the file as fact. The family's version enters as a problem to be managed. Mihai's friend names it at one point, and the line sticks: the arrogance of these countries, trying to "civilize" the Gheorghius, as if civilization were a form you fill out. Mungiu lets it hang there, and then the film quietly inverts it — because by the end, the people behaving like barbarians are not the ones praying at the kitchen table. They are the polite professionals, dismantling a family in a language it doesn't speak, certain they are helping.

Mungiu has been making this film, in a sense, for nineteen years. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) was about a woman navigating a system — Ceaușescu's Romania, where abortion was a state crime — that treated her body as government property. The system wore a communist uniform. Beyond the Hills (2012) moved the machine inside a monastery: religious groupthink, exorcism performed as love, a young woman dead at the end of everyone's good intentions. Graduation (2016) was a father gaming a corrupt bureaucracy to buy his daughter a future. RMN (2022) was a Transylvanian village deciding who belongs and expelling the rest.

Mungiu films people caught inside systems that claim to protect them, and he is forensic about the claiming. In 2007 the machine was the Romanian state telling women what their bodies were for. In 2026 it is the Norwegian welfare state telling parents what their children are for. The machine changed flags, changed languages, got better interior design. The people are still crushed the same way.

In this case, the agency in question in Fjord is called Barnevernet, and it operates under Norway's Child Welfare Act. Section 4-6 says that if there is a danger a child could be harmed by staying at home, the welfare office manager — or the police — can remove the child immediately, without the parents' consent and without a court order. A county welfare board reviews the decision within six weeks, but the removal happens first. Anyone can file a report; teachers and principals are legally required to. The standard for intervention is "the best interests of the child," which the law deliberately leaves undefined, and it covers preventive action — risk that is merely anticipated. The body that issues a formal care order is not a court but a county welfare board, an administrative tribunal with a lay majority.

The Bodnariu case, the one Fjord is built on, went like this: November 16, 2015. Two daughters taken out of school without the parents' knowledge. Police at the house, police at the father's workplace. Five children, split across three foster homes. The principal had only asked for family counseling. The trigger was the children telling classmates they got light spankings, and the school reporting the family's teaching that God punishes sin. There was no medical evidence of abuse.

And the European Court of Human Rights has been telling Norway this is wrong for years. In Strand Lobben v. Norway (2019), the Grand Chamber ruled 13 to 4 that Norway violated the right to family life: a three-week-old taken from his mother, adopted out, and eleven years later a court finally said the authorities had "failed from the outset to pursue the aim of reuniting" them. Eleven years. The child was grown.

So the film is not exaggerating the machine. If anything, it is polite about it. Which brings us to the provocation, because Fjord won the Palme d'Or and half the room grumbled. The reporting out of Cannes described "a dark chorus of grumbling," and the presumed sin, as one critic put it, was that Mungiu had taken "a right-wing position on the well-intended ministrations of a liberal, supposedly enlightened Western state." Park Chan-wook's jury gave it the top prize anyway — only the tenth time a director has won the Palme twice — plus FIPRESCI and three more jury prizes, which suggests the grumbling was not universal. But the grumbling is the interesting part. It tells you exactly what nerve the film hit.

Mungiu has said, plainly, what he was doing: he wanted to explore what happens when conservatives end up in the minority, by putting the audience in their shoes. "As soon as we identify someone as belonging to another group, we become violent animals," he said. "But the first animal you should tame is the one within yourself." And: "We live in our bubbles... I think we need to find a way to leave these bubbles if we are to be able to recreate some kind of social peace." He called the film "a plea for tolerance, inclusion and empathy" and "a pledge against any kind of fundamentalism."

The performances are the experiment's instruments, and they are tuned low. Stan — Romanian-born, finally working in his native accent, acting across Romanian, Norwegian, and English — does his best work in the scenes where he understands nothing: sitting through interrogations, smiling at the wrong moments, trying to be cooperative in a room that has already decided. There is a specific kind of fear that only exists in a second language, and Stan plays it without ever reaching for it. Reinsve has the crueler part. Lisbet is the Norwegian one, the bridge, the nurse, the fluent one — and the film's quietest brutality is that her fluency saves nothing. It only makes her the family's designated translator of its own ruin. She gets to understand, in real time, exactly how the machine is misreading them, and she cannot stop it.

The marriage is the film's real battleground. The state does not just take the children; it drafts the couple into the procedure. Who speaks. Who understands. Who breaks first. Who gets angry at whom, and in front of whom. Mungiu has always been good at this — the way institutions do their deepest damage not in courtrooms but at kitchen tables — and here it is almost unbearable, because the Gheorghius' unity is the one thing the film never questions, and the machine is designed, however politely, to dismantle exactly that.

In the courtroom scenes, the judges cut them off. Every time Mihai or Lisbet tries to speak from the place where a parent actually speaks — grief, anger, the raw unpresentable stuff — they are told, in effect, to compose themselves. The proceedings cannot tolerate a single unscripted emotion. Think about what that demands: the state takes your children, and then it grades your reaction to having your children taken, and the grade goes in the file. Your rage becomes evidence. Your composure becomes evidence. There is no version of you that is not evidence.

The fjord itself is beautiful. Mungiu's camera never blinks. After two and a half hours, you understand it was never watching the family. It was watching you — to see which side you picked, and how early, and before what evidence. 🎞️