Justin Chang’s review of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord finds something more difficult than a culture-war parable. A conservative Christian family moves from Romania to Norway; allegations of physical punishment lead authorities to remove their five children. The film asks how protection, prejudice, and bureaucratic certainty can become entangled.
- Chang rejects a blanket reading of the film as an attack on the welfare state: an institution can have a necessary mission and still exercise its power unjustly.
- The parents are not innocent simply because officials behave badly. Their homophobia and religious authoritarianism remain under scrutiny.
- The film’s ambiguity has a cost: after their removal, the children largely disappear from view, denying them the private testimony that might complicate the adults’ arguments.
- Its most hopeful figures are a secular neighbor who agrees to defend the parents and her daughter, whose love for one of their children challenges the family’s orthodoxies.
The distinction worth keeping is between solidarity and agreement. Defending someone’s rights need not mean endorsing their beliefs; defending public welfare need not mean suspending criticism of its institutions.
Chang’s reservation about the absent children is just as important. A film can make an engrossing moral puzzle while withholding the very people whose lives are at stake.