Film: The coldest of all Seas - wins Palme d’Or 2026

On Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses central scenes and developments in the film.

There are films you walk out of and immediately know: Yes. Exactly. That’s it. And then there are films that release you with a slight resistance at first, with a hesitation or an inward shrug, even though they have long since begun to go to work on you.

When I came out of Fjord, I certainly did not immediately think: Of course. Palme d’Or. This is the one.

By now, I am rowing forcefully forward for once and saying: Yes. Perhaps it is good that this film exists now.

With an only seemingly cool modesty, Mungiu’s film takes on something enormously complex without making itself larger than its subject. In Fjord, too, he draws on something that, now crowned with a second Palme d’Or, can be located in the present as his cinematic language. Even if some will quite reasonably think: Angelopoulos! Mungiu’s formal clarity allows the subjects he takes hold of to remain so radically amoral that the voyeuristic condition of being a cinema-goer is activated on a level we may actually need in an age of mass media and passive access to lives that are not our own. And that is why I forgive him the psychological consternation he puts us through—because he is still making cinema, not shock art. I like that someone is saying: Watch. Endure. Be affected. WITHOUT giving up poetry in images, and without handing us the solution to the problem along with them.

His images do not impose themselves on the people in them; the film’s political significance is not displayed through grand gestures. Fjord stays close to a family, to rooms, glances, and the peculiar inner life of the everyday, and from there allows a conflict to emerge that resists classification altogether. For us, and for those whose lives we are peering into. Perhaps that is where its real greatness lies: the film knows how much its story contains and yet retains a remarkable calm—the kind only a camera can have.

Cristian Mungiu tells the story of the Gheorghiu family: Mihai, played by Sebastian Stan, and Lisbet, played by Renate Reinsve, who move with their five children to a small Norwegian town on a fjord. Lisbet is Norwegian, Mihai Romanian. He arrives as someone who has made a decision. For this country, for this place as the center of his life, for the work, for a life within the laws that apply there. His presence is not temporary. He wants to locate himself here.

And yet he is prevented from arriving.

Perhaps one of the film’s deepest fault lines runs through this very point: cultures can only encounter one another if they are actually allowed to encounter one another. That means people have to be made aware of rules, boundaries have to be explained, conflicts have to be worked through. Anyone who moves to another country has to engage with its laws. But those who already live there also bear responsibility. They have to meet the newcomer where he is, speak with him, give him the chance to understand something, to change, to find his place without having to shed himself entirely.

In Fjord, something else happens. A suspicion enters the room, and almost instantly that suspicion becomes reality. The child protection workers hardly arrive as people who want to help, explain, or examine the situation together. They appear as enforcers of a certainty that has already been established. They are right. And the law is on their side. And that feeling is enough.

The five children are taken from the family.

A state that looks away when children experience violence has failed. Mungiu’s film does not fundamentally question that responsibility. What it does show is how the desire to protect can itself assume an authoritarian form once it has rid itself of all uncertainty. Once people appear only as cases. Once an institution no longer asks how it might help a family live—and remain—within another society, and instead merely examines the points at which that family deviates from the prescribed form.

Anyone who has children probably knows how difficult it already is to be a family without these watchful eyes. Parenting consists of mistakes, overwhelm, decisions one would make differently later, and the daily attempt to hold on to one another anyway. Fjord responds to a present in which people incessantly reprimand one another: for their language, their relationships, their convictions, the way they live, and especially the way they raise their children. Attention becomes control. Care can become a form of power. And a society in which everyone waits for the other person’s mistakes creates wounds of its own.

Families need help. Far more often than they need judgment.

The relationship between parents and children is one of those relationships into which society must intervene when a child is in danger. At the same time, there are moments when it should fall silent, become careful, and preserve a certain—and I use the word deliberately—sacredness. I do not mean the sacredness of the family as an untouchable institution. Nor the sacredness of rules, procedures, and measures. I mean the sacredness of protection: the knowledge that something has grown between a child and their parents that can be wounded by intervention, even when that intervention takes place in the name of good.

When something within a family causes fear, we have to look. But looking might also mean trying to reach the parents for the sake of a better tomorrow. Helping them take responsibility, understand something, change something. Our world has always consisted of children and the people who are supposed to care for them. Anyone who wants only to save the child while treating the parents as lost or morally unusable people overlooks how closely their emotional realities remain intertwined.

A society bears responsibility for the way it intervenes. Humiliation, exclusion, and the feeling of having been condemned from the outset can harden people. Someone who feels neither welcome nor seen may retreat even further into precisely those convictions that others are trying to fight in them. Help requires boundaries. At times it requires great resolve. But it should keep open the possibility of a shared tomorrow. A society has to go on living with the consequences of its interventions.

The trauma caused by the abrupt separation of parents and children is immediately comprehensible in the film. Mungiu hardly needs to explain it. He stretches the question across long periods of time: Will they make it? Will they make it? Will they make it?

Meanwhile, a corset tightened around me as well. Please, please, don’t lose control now. Please, Mihai, no outburst, no voice raised too loudly, no wrong movement, so that you can keep your children. I began monitoring the family through the eyes of the institution. Every reaction could be used against them.

At the same time, the opposite desire grew: Surely someone has to show a real emotion at last. Someone has to be allowed to despair. To scream. To collapse. How is a father supposed to remain calm while his children are being taken from him? How is a mother supposed to react with restraint when her entire life is falling apart?

But this village leaves almost no room for genuine feeling. Every reaction is immediately psychologized, registered, and turned into a potential symptom. We see this in Noora, played by Henrikke Lund-Olsen: whatever bursts out of her is hardly allowed simply to be a feeling. It immediately becomes a problem that must be named, categorized, and eliminated.

This is precisely where one of the most impressive achievements of the direction lies. The film makes us demand, as we watch, the same self-control that imprisons its characters. We hope they will control themselves perfectly because every human reaction could make their situation worse. And in doing so, we realize how inhuman a space has become when only those who make no wrong movement at the moment of greatest despair can survive within it. The person who is right is the person who can recite the hygiene rules without a single mistake.

It works.

It works wonderfully.

And it works very often today, doesn’t it?

The film lodges itself behind the retina, above all psychologically. It plays with fear, with the tiny residue of hope after every new humiliation, with the possibility that at any moment a reasonable person might enter the room and say: Wait. Let us look at this again. Instead, the room keeps closing in.

Then the courtroom.

Large panes of glass. The sea beyond them—today, almost like a bad joke.

One cannot help thinking, unfortunately, of the great Anatomy of a Fall, a film that here almost feels as though it has already laid out the form in advance: the drama of a family, the transformation of the home into a supposed crime scene, a criminal case that perhaps never was one, and finally those long, exhausting courtroom scenes in which a shared life is dismantled until nothing remains of it but statements, contradictions, and individual pieces capable of being entered into evidence. This cinematic form already exists. Enter psychologically into a family, open its most intimate fractures, and then negotiate in a courtroom what kind of truth can be produced from them.

The courtroom scenes in Fjord are strong. And yet, while watching them, I knew: cinema can go further. There are films that open something beneath every argumentative level for which I no longer have a ready-made language.

And then there is this sea.

In my essay on Nolan’s Odyssey, Being in the Sea, the sea was vastness, abyss, movement—a reality against which the human being remains little more than a fragile assertion. In Fjord, too, we are in the sea. In another way. Nicely tucked away in modern warmth. Here a sea lies behind the glass. The people in the courtroom speak about law, parenting, religion, violence, and responsibility, while outside rests a mass of water that knows none of their categories.

If only, before every adjudication of a conflict, guilty or innocent, we were made to look out at the sea for a moment and remember.

The sea does not listen. It passes no judgment. It is older than every state and every law.

Perhaps it is precisely this background that makes the certainty inside the room seem so small. People speak as though an entire life could finally and conclusively be measured. Behind them, the cold water, motionless and unimpressed by the human capacity to declare itself the measure of all things.

I was especially moved by Lisbet. Renate Reinsve plays this mother with a passivity that is at times almost unbearable. Some of it seems to come from her religious upbringing: the confidence that things will turn out well because one is protected; that truth will prevail in the end; that one can surrender oneself to a higher order.

This faith gives them something to hold on to. It gives that to her children too, who, even after being taken away, still want to go home. They are so well-behaved that everything can happen without an outburst. At the same time, this steadfast faith in God can leave a person defenseless against a state that wants to create “safety” and exploits every opening that other people’s trust leaves it. But would I—or that terribly tearful foster mother, bathing in a warm tub of substanceless female empowerment as though she herself were suffering the greatest injustice because she is not allowed to mother these lovely children, as though “caution” alone gave her some right to them—really prefer the children in this situation to be without that inner source of support? For a long time, Lisbet’s family does not seem to understand the severity with which they are being treated. She still trusts when the system has long since begun working against her.

Shortly before the court’s decision, Lisbet stands outside and prays. She turns to God because almost nothing else remains to her. The people around her look at her as though this gesture alone were proof that something is wrong with her. Faith under blanket suspicion.

That scene struck me.

A free state must not organize itself according to religious commandments. The dangers of such an order are well known. But when do we talk about the danger that arises when the individual is no longer allowed to believe? To turn toward something above them. No one has the right to label a person simply because they pray.

Perhaps the thought of something higher would even do us good. Less as a compulsory confession of faith than as a correction to our own fantasies of grandeur. Faith can open a perspective from which we recognize how little we know about other people and how rarely we are entitled to make ourselves their judges. It can mean humility. The recognition that we all fail, that we all need forgiveness, and that no human being can be reduced entirely to their worst action.

At the same time, Fjord shows that secular society is by no means free of rituals and traditions. Toward the end, Norwegian folk songs can be heard, and suddenly singing is allowed. This tradition is considered cultural, harmless, perhaps even beautiful. The family’s Christian songs, by contrast, had previously appeared suspicious. There is a barely articulated imbalance here: one tradition is permitted to be called identity; the other becomes evidence.

All the more moving is Mia, played by Lisa Carlehed. The neighbor and former lawyer returns to her profession for the sake of the family. The film draws her as someone who practices yoga and seeks relaxation. At the end, she stands in the church, surrounded by the family’s exuberant gratitude, and hardly knows what to do with it.

Perhaps one learns that through faith. Perhaps one learns it through a healthy relationship with oneself. The ability to say: Yes, I did that well. I was glad to help you. It was difficult. And I faced that difficulty.

We are people capable of taking on difficult things without consulting catalogues first.

In this church scene, Mia’s mindfulness briefly loses its controlled, private form. Something pours toward her. Gratitude, closeness, community, a joy far too large to be turned into an exercise. She stands there, moved and almost helpless, and perhaps that is precisely what makes visible that a person needs more than techniques to remain in balance with themselves. Sometimes they need a community that tells them what their action has meant to others.

Despite all this, one dimension is missing for me in Fjord.

I would have liked to go home with Frida, the short-haired child protection worker played by Lisa Loven Kongsli.

Just for twenty minutes.

I would have liked to see how she lives. Whether doubt appears somewhere when she takes off her jacket and stands alone in her kitchen. What brought her into this profession. What she has experienced. Which children she may once have protected too late. What story made her act with such certainty. Or I would have followed a new employee through the agency, someone who believes in the duty to protect children and at the same time notices what is happening to this family there. Someone who senses that a system can exercise violence even when every individual step is covered by a regulation.

The same applies to the man who puts Mihai through the wringer in court. Who is he once he leaves the courtroom? Where does his hardness come from? Is there a moment in which he doubts? Or has he learned to regard doubt as a professional weakness?

Mungiu denies these characters an inner life. It is effective. And yet, precisely because Mungiu is such an experienced filmmaker, I cannot help believing that he could have given us even more—could have written over, and into, what we ourselves imagine through the images that are missing. Their impenetrability makes them frightening. The film demonstrates how institutions appear when they enter a family’s life: faceless, certain, cold.

And yet it does not feel entirely true to me.

Perhaps in nine years we will see a Mungiu Palme d’Or winner that does even more to us, and that is allowed even more room for images that do not psychologize, because by then it will feel entirely natural to us that we can see poetry again; because, with the resources we save through cancel culture, we will once again be able to generate an energy capable of carrying—and enduring—more human weight, heavy and light alike.

But without letting anyone fall.

Because people are rarely so free of cracks. Cinema, in particular, can make those cracks visible. It can take us along with someone whose actions we reject and show us from what fear, what experience, or what old wound that person acts. Understanding would not be an excuse. It would be an expansion of the gaze. We would have to extend ourselves around one another instead of remaining short.

Perhaps Mungiu wanted precisely this blank space. Perhaps his film needs the hardness of its opposing fronts so that people can leave the cinema having seen completely different things. I can imagine viewers considering Frida’s actions justified and blaming Mihai for everything. Perhaps this is where a particular intelligence of the film lies: it leaves behind enough material for every side to take its certainties home with it.

Tomorrow, though, what interests me is a cinema that unsettles those certainties.

Perhaps in ten years there will once again be more room for the question of how a person became what we now oppose in them.

I still cannot quite grasp the narrative thread involving Åke, the grandfather in need of care. Perhaps it will become clearer once I have carried the film around with me for longer. I’ll take that. A film does not have to fully reveal itself the moment one leaves the cinema. Some of its movements only become visible later.

Fjord is highly political. It is charged. It responds to something that has spread in an almost insidious way: the habit of constantly testing other people for their correctness and, from a sense of moral certainty, claiming authority over them.

The film kept me in suspense. It weighed on me. It found powerful images. It left me standing with Lisbet outside the courthouse while she prays and the others look at her as though she were godless.

And it left me with a wish.

I wanted to go to the place where perhaps, after all, a doubt still lives.

A place where a teenage love story might have had the chance to live itself out—Noora and Elia. And where their father, rather conservative on that point, might have been allowed to grow in his love for good reason. A place that is now, once again, separated from the truth by a cold sea.

Perhaps the coldest of all seas.

And yet, really, large enough for more than one truth.