Dir: Cristian Mungiu | Drama 2026
Cristian Mungiu returns to the main Competition with Fjord, his first English-language feature since detonating the Croisette nearly two decades ago with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Set in a remote Norwegian village, the film follows a Romanian-Norwegian family whose strict child-rearing methods trigger suspicion after bruises are discovered on their daughter, unleashing the full machinery of Scandinavian child services and communal judgment.
The cast is a starry one for the Croisette, but the characters are as unsympathetic as their freezing location. Sebastian Stan, fresh off his run through prestige biopic territory and still carrying the heat of The Apprentice, plays the father with clenched-jaw fury, while Renate Reinsve — forever Cannes royalty after The Worst Person in the World— gives the film its flickering emotional uncertainty. Mungiu, meanwhile, continues mining the moral rot beneath polite European society, territory he previously explored in Beyond the Hills Graduation and RMN.
Visually, Fjord is immaculate: glacial landscapes, crowded dinner-table compositions, long takes that seem to trap characters inside their own self-righteous indignation. Fjord is a richly thematic piece, raising questions about multiculturalism, liberal paternalism, faith, assimilation and the violence hidden inside “civilised” systems – and the Romanian twist gives the film a glint of dark humour and bracing gasp of relief. Yet for all its technical command, this worthwhile drama lands with an oddly exhausted thud.
The central provocations — child cruelty, institutional overreach, state intervention into family life — feel less incendiary than dutifully recycled, the kind of festival-house moral anguish audiences have been trained to process on autopilot. Where outrage is clearly intended, the prevailing reaction is more like weary recognition: not shock, but a collective sigh of “this again.”
At the risk of being over-critical staring at bleak mountainsides, melting ice-caps and dour do-gooders for over two hours makes you long for a sunny terrace and few glasses of Provençal rosé.
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2026