Cannes 79 - Fjord

The 79th Cannes Film Festival is over, and, strangely enough, it already feels forgettable. An underwhelming and disappointing edition defined less by discovery or cinematic revelation than by absence: absent auteurs, absent risks, absent cinematic epiphanies. Whether it was the diminished American presence, major filmmakers increasingly gravitating toward streaming platforms, or simply a weak year from the very directors Cannes has spent decades cultivating, the result was a Competition lineup that rarely felt worthy of the festival’s mythic stature.

And that sense of creative exhaustion culminated in the Palme d’Or awarded to Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord: a respectable film elevated to a level of prestige it never remotely earns. Not an embarrassment, perhaps, but certainly a monument to mediocrity. Instead, it leaves Cannes crowned as the supposed pinnacle of world cinema. Which is especially frustrating because the few films that truly felt alive, especially Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s El Ser Querido, were left overshadowed by a jury seemingly rewarding familiarity over ambition.

Set in a remote Norwegian town surrounded by imposing fjords, Fjord follows a deeply religious Romanian family, father, mother, five children, including a baby, attempting to build a new life abroad. But after local authorities grow concerned about the children’s different upbringing, allegations of physical abuse emerge, and Norway’s child welfare services intervene and suddenly separate the children from their parents.

The premise immediately taps into combustible contemporary anxieties: migration, cultural relativism, institutional overreach, and the clash between conservative family values and progressive Scandinavian social systems. Yet Fjord quickly reveals itself to be surprisingly one-dimensional.

Mungiu never seriously interrogates the parents’ innocence. From the outset, the family is framed almost exclusively as victims of a cold, bureaucratic machine incapable of nuance or empathy. The Norwegian child welfare agents rapidly become senseless antagonists, embodiment of institutional cruelty rather than believable individuals operating within a flawed but complex system. Their actions feel exaggerated to the point of caricature, stripping the film of any ambiguity.

And the choice of Norway as setting is hardly accidental. Mungiu deliberately situates the story in a society where questions surrounding child protection and social intervention are especially sensitive and aggressively enforced. What may be culturally tolerated in rural Romania becomes unacceptable within the Scandinavian welfare state. Yet instead of exploring that moral grey zone with genuine complexity, Fjord ultimately reinforces the very stereotypes it initially appears interested in dissecting.

What’s most striking is how absent the children themselves are from the emotional core of the narrative, despite being the very reason the story exists. Instead, Mungiu focuses almost entirely on the anguish of the parents and the growing despair of a neighbour who reluctantly becomes their legal advocate against an increasingly hostile local community. The film wants to function as both intimate family tragedy and broader social critique, but the themes pile up awkwardly: childcare abuse, migration, xenophobia, religious conservatism, integration, even suicide. Rather than deepening the story, they often feel forcefully inserted, as though Mungiu no longer trusts the central conflict to carry enough weight on its own.

Sebastian Stan’s casting only adds another layer of oddity. To his credit, he delivers an impressively restrained and believable performance as the family’s exhausted patriarch, avoiding melodrama entirely. But the decision to cast a globally recognisable Hollywood actor as an otherwise ordinary Romanian IT supervisor remains baffling. There is no transformative showcase here, no towering dramatic centerpiece requiring star power. One cannot help but wonder why Mungiu didn’t simply cast a Romanian actor instead?

And now Cristian Mungiu joins the increasingly crowded double Palme d’Or club, a distinction that once felt nearly sacred. Year by year, that exclusivity erodes, reflecting a potentially troubling tendency within Cannes itself: rewarding established auteurs not necessarily for making the best films, but simply for continuing to exist within the institution’s canon.

3/