Fjord (2026)

The layers of communication, miscommunication, and mistranslation that shape Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2026) reach uncountable within the first hour. The first presented layer is the Romanian-Norwegian Gheorghiu household, bilingual in Romanian and English, the children now assimilating to the Norwegian-speaking community where they’ve moved. I’ve already skipped over the zeroeth presented layer, though, wherein the parents communicate their family’s values to their disobedient coming-of-age children. In this first scene, Elia has been scolded while the bus waits outside to take them to their first day of school in Norway. In a moment, the children shall be spoken to by their headmaster and teachers in both English and Norwegian. The adults want to be both polite and direct, though the headmaster then mispronounces Elia’s name as “Ella” in his introductions of her to the school community. Already, Fjord transmits the lossiness of verbal communication while many socialization groups are rapidly traversed. There’s an acknowledged acceptance of this lossiness, as the father, Mihai, starts work as an system administrator in the local government. He explains to his colleagues that he can understand their Norwegian just fine and only has trouble speaking it clearly. He is content to not even try to speak Norwegian and speak English with them instead. Like the many cultural chasms Fjord presents, everyone at the table interprets the issues as minimizable, something nuances can be flattened out of.

The social strata expands as the parents, Mihai and Lisbet, and older children, Elia and Emmanuel, encounter new people at work, at school, on the street in their neighbourhood; and the film refines the existing layers in novel ways. To me, it’s most interesting to see Mihai evangelize to his children using a traditional Christian mistranslation (he says Jesus was born in “a stable,” which scholars now know to be false) and then to see them parrot their father’s conservative Christian values to Noora and peers from school. (In private, this makes the secular majority uncomfortable.) Later, they complicate this by presenting their real personal-spiritual lives that have little to do with their father. The childrens’s relationships to each other, too, bear little resemblence to the procedural social interactions of the adults. They communicate in underground ways, through bedroom windows at night, and about whatever they want. Many of the adults belong to many social groups central to the story (especially Mia, the headmaster’s wife, a good neighbour, and eventually the Gheorghiu’s civil lawyer). Their personal values don’t always cross all social lines in predictable ways, and the film doesn’t dishonestly type anyone. When a character exerts expertise in a social role (whether the role is sysadmin, lawyer, child social worker, or Christian), the spirit of detachment that anchors the film allows them to present simply as experts who should be sought for their expertise. Only through the justice system are their beliefs and values meaningfully challenged.

The father, Mihai, specifically, could be broadly painted as a brain-rotted, child-abusing conservative content creator. Instead, he is only painted that way narrowly: whenever that information directly threatens his community or indicates his children could be unsafe. Fjord preserves empathy for him, and everyone else, and the Norwegian systems where it’s easy to argue there’s no need to. Another traditional Christian mistranslation, the notion that David is the killer of Goliath, is invoked as a metaphor to describe the Gheorghiu family’s situation. Through this, and the internet media we see from the religious right, the Gheorghius’s trial is flattened into representing all citizens of the kingdom of heaven. The state is now characterized as threatening their way of life. Any nuance or detail about the possibility of real child abuse has been falsely translated out of the narrative, just as any possibility of the absence of real child abuse has been warped out of the state’s narrative against this traditional family. Meanwhile, the kids are not portrayed as being part of the trial process. They continue to connect to each other, and with Noora, beyond the constructed social strata, building a seemingly more authentic, lasting relationship.