• Sebastian Stan stars in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which received a 12-minute standing ovation at its Cannes world premiere — the longest of the festival so far
• Stan plays a Romanian engineer whose conservative religious family is torn apart by Norwegian child protective services after relocating to a fjord village
• Renate Reinsve co-stars as his Norwegian wife; the two previously appeared together in 2024’s A Different Man
• Stan, who was born in Romania, said the film gave him a chance to “rebond” with his home country
• Neon has acquired U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand rights, with early Oscar buzz building around Stan’s multilingual performance

When the credits rolled on Fjord at Cannes, the person sitting next to one critic reportedly gasped “Sebastian Stan!?” — not because he was unrecognizable, exactly, but because nobody quite expected a Marvel star to show up in the new film from Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director who won the 2007 Palme d’Or for the brutal abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Then again, if you’ve been paying attention to Stan’s choices lately — the droll indie fable A Different Man, his unsettling turn as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice — you know he’s been deliberately pushing himself into territory most blockbuster actors wouldn’t go near.

Fjord is his most ambitious move yet. The film received a 12-minute standing ovation at its world premiere Monday night, the longest of this year’s festival so far, and it’s easy to understand why. This is a film that refuses to let you get comfortable — and Stan is the engine of that discomfort.

What Fjord Is Actually About

Stan plays Mihai Gheorghiu, a Romanian engineer (described in the film’s press materials as an IT technician, though other accounts identify him as aeronautical) who has relocated his wife Lisbet — played by Sentimental Value standout Renate Reinsve — and their five children, including a nursing baby, to the Norwegian fjord village where Lisbet was born. The family is devoutly Evangelical. No phones, no secular music, no YouTube. Homosexuality is taught as a mortal sin. The kids study the Bible. Mihai plays hymns in the cafeteria at lunch.

None of that is illegal. But when one of the older children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), shows up at school with bruises on her back, a teacher calls child protective services. And from there, Fjord becomes something far harder to categorize than a simple immigrant family drama.

The Norwegian state moves swiftly — all five children are removed from the household while an investigation proceeds, including the infant still being breastfed by Lisbet. A civil case follows, then a criminal one. The bureaucratic machinery is calm, polite, and utterly crushing. “No one can know what goes on inside a family,” one character notes, and the film takes that uncertainty seriously, holding key facts back while giving equal weight to everyone’s competing version of the truth.

Mungiu, who has spent his career depicting people ground down by oppressive systems, pulls off something genuinely daring here: the oppressive system is progressive Norway. Its child welfare apparatus, with its breezy talk of trauma and best interests, becomes the institutional force that destroys a family. The main caseworker, Gunda (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), maintains a “terrifyingly reasonable tone” while arguing there’s no inherent reason to believe a biological parent’s care is always ideal. The state’s attorney sneers. The foster care drags on for months.

And yet — and this is where Mungiu earns his reputation — he never lets the Gheorghius off the hook either. Mihai admits in his deposition to “slapping” the children. He rallies an international coalition of religious conservatives to pressure the Norwegian government. He is, as one review put it, “a wronged man just as often as he is in the wrong.” The film’s quietly devastating argument is that what Norway is really enforcing isn’t child safety so much as cultural conformity — the same assimilation pressure that has historically been used to “civilize” Indigenous populations like the Sámi — just dressed up in the language of progressive values.

It wouldn’t take much for this material to tip into right-wing culture-war fantasy, and there are moments, particularly when the sneering prosecutor is onscreen, where it does tilt that direction. But Mungiu is too intelligent a filmmaker to leave it there. Both sides are full of people who, in their good intentions, cannot conceive for a moment that they might be biased. The film asks its audience to sit in that discomfort rather than escape it.

Stan Reconnects With His Romanian Roots

For Stan, the role carries a deeply personal dimension. He left Romania at around age 8 with his mother, during a period when the vast majority of the country was suffering under the economic hardship and political repression of communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. It was, as he described it at the Cannes press conference, a chaotic departure.

“I left in a very chaotic way, and I’ve really tried to educate myself about the country,” Stan told journalists on Tuesday, describing the film as having given him the chance “to rebond” with the country of his birth.

Mungiu revealed that he only began writing the script — inspired by true stories — after Stan had already agreed to take on the role. The character of Mihai required Stan to perform much of the film in Romanian, with English and Norwegian woven throughout. It’s a genuinely trilingual performance, and by all accounts it’s the best work of his career.

Reinsve, who previously co-starred with Stan in A Different Man, said the role was its own kind of challenge. “It was very scary to go into playing someone who was doing something wrong and was violent without knowing it,” she said at the press conference.

Stan was also asked about his understanding of Donald Trump following The Apprentice, which competed at Cannes in 2024. His answer was blunt. Noting that the film had faced threats similar to those experienced by late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert during Trump’s second term, Stan said simply: “We’re in a really, really bad place.”

The Performances, the Craft, the Oscar Talk

Fjord marks Mungiu’s first venture into languages other than Romanian — a significant step for a filmmaker so associated with a specific national cinema. He pulls it off. His signature style is intact: long, unbroken takes, a camera that keeps its distance, no musical score beyond occasional source music, and a narrative architecture so precisely constructed that all the major players — neighbors, teachers, lawyers, a rebellious teenager named Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) who develops a complicated closeness to the Gheorghius’ eldest daughter — are introduced and interwoven before the 15-minute mark.

Cinematographer Vladimir Banduru captures Norway’s landscape beautifully — glaciers, lakes, the wide fjord valleys — while also conveying the suffocating smallness of a village where your neighbor is also your child’s principal, your lawyer, and the person who helped start the investigation against you.

Stan’s performance has drawn some minor quibbles — one critic noted that the prosthetic hairline used to make him look more ordinary feels overly artificial — but the consensus is that it didn’t need the gimmick anyway. The performance carries itself. Reinsve matches him, playing a woman who returned home after two decades away and finds herself a stranger in her own culture, steadfast in beliefs her neighbors find incomprehensible.

Neon has already acquired rights across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. With Fjord competing for the Palme d’Or — the winner will be announced May 23 — and the critical reception here running extremely warm, the film is already being discussed as a frontrunner for a Best International Feature Oscar nomination. Stan himself is being mentioned as a dark horse Best Actor contender.

Mungiu has competed at Cannes four times, winning the Palme d’Or in 2007, Best Screenplay for Beyond the Hills in 2012, and Best Director for Graduation in 2016. Fjord is his first film since 2022’s R.M.N. — and if the 12-minute ovation is any indication, the wait was worth it.

“We’ve been blessed,” Mihai says early in the film, visibly uneasy with the phrase. By the end of Fjord, you understand exactly why.

The post Sebastian Stan Stuns Cannes With Fjord appeared first on Cream.

• Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord received the longest standing ovation of Cannes 2026 — lasting up to 12 minutes — after its world premiere
• Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as evangelical parents whose children are taken by Norwegian Child Services
• The film marks Mungiu’s English-language debut and his fifth time competing at Cannes
• Neon — which has backed every Palme d’Or winner since 2019 — already holds distribution rights across the US, UK, Australia and more
• Mungiu previously won the Palme d’Or in 2007, making a second win a genuine possibility this year

Cristian Mungiu may have just blown the Palme d’Or race wide open. The Romanian director’s Fjord had its world premiere at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Monday night, and the Cannes crowd responded with the most thunderous reception any competition film has received so far this festival — a standing ovation that stretched anywhere from 10 to 12 minutes depending on who you ask, with both Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve visibly moved to tears on stage.

The film follows the Gheorghiu family — a Romanian father (Stan) and a Norwegian mother (Reinsve), both devout evangelical Christians — who relocate with their five children to the remote fjord village where the mother was born. They settle in beside the Halbergs, a neighboring family with a very different worldview, and the children of both families quickly grow close. But when the Gheorghius are suspected of disturbing behavior, Norwegian Child Services descends on their home, and what follows is a nightmare of bureaucratic overreach that strips them of their kids — teenagers, tweens, and an infant — one by one.

During the press screening earlier that afternoon, journalists could be heard gasping and laughing in disbelief as each new layer of red tape tightened around the couple. By the time the gala audience experienced it that evening, the silence in the room was total — rapt, barely breathing — right up until the final frame, when the theater erupted.

A Star-Studded Room for a Career-Defining Night

The premiere had been one of the hottest tickets of the festival. Students with Three Days in Cannes badges — distributed for the second half of the event — had been queuing outside in their gowns and tuxedos since 10 a.m., sheltering from the festival’s first rainstorm under borrowed umbrellas.

Inside, the gala audience included Sharon Stone, Carla Bruni, and Cannes jury member Demi Moore. Jordan Firstman was there fresh off the news of his debut feature Club Kid selling to A24 for $17 million. And Stellan Skarsgård made the trip to cheer on Reinsve, who played his daughter in last year’s Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value — the film that also made her a two-time Cannes favorite after her Best Actress win for The Worst Person in the World in 2021.

Stan, for his part, is no stranger to the Croisette either — he was here in 2024 for The Apprentice, his portrayal of a young Donald Trump. But this feels like a different kind of moment.

Why This Could Be Mungiu’s Second Palme

Fjord is also a landmark in another sense: it’s Mungiu’s first English-language film, and his first feature since the 2022 drama R.M.N. He’s competed in Cannes four times now, and he’s never left empty-handed — winning the Palme d’Or in 2007 for the Communist-era abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Best Screenplay in 2012 for Beyond the Hills, and Best Director in 2016 for Graduation. A second Palme would put him in rare company.

The film’s distributor adds another layer of intrigue to its awards prospects. Neon acquired rights to Fjord — covering the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand — a full year before its Cannes debut. The company has backed the Palme d’Or winner every single year since 2019: Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, and this year’s It Was Just an Accident. They also have Hope and Paper Tiger premiering at this year’s festival. Whatever Neon touches at Cannes lately seems to turn to gold — and they got to Fjord early.

The jury hands out the trophies on Saturday. After Monday night, it’s hard to imagine them not having a very long conversation about this one.

The post Fjord Gets Cannes’ Biggest Standing Ovation Yet appeared first on Cream.

• Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival to strong reviews
• Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as Romanian-Norwegian parents accused of child abuse in Norway
• The film marks Mungiu’s first feature set outside Romania, shot on location in a Norwegian fjord town
• NEON will release Fjord in U.S. theaters later this year
• Mungiu previously won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu has never been a filmmaker who makes things easy for his audience — and with Fjord, which world premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, he’s made something that might be his most genuinely unsettling work in years. Not because it’s dark, exactly. Because it refuses to let you off the hook.

Sebastian Stan — bald, rigid, barely making eye contact at parties — plays Mihai Gheorghiu, a Romanian software engineer who has relocated his family of seven to a scenic fjord community in Norway after the death of his parents. His wife Lisbet, played by Norway’s Renate Reinsve in what critics are already calling a career-high performance, grew up nearby. On paper, this is a homecoming. In practice, it becomes a slow-motion collision between two entirely different ideas of what a good life looks like.

The Gheorghius are devoutly Evangelical Christians. Strict ones. Daily Bible study, no cellphones, no video games, no secular music. Mihai runs the household on a point system and doesn’t spare the occasional slap when he feels his children have earned one. In Romania, where he comes from, that’s not unusual. In Norway — one of the world’s consistently happiest countries with some of the most progressive child welfare laws on earth — it is very much a problem.

When their eldest daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) shows up to gym class with bruises on her body, the school’s child protection team moves fast. All five Gheorghiu children — including a newborn who still breastfeeds — are removed from the home while investigators determine whether abuse has taken place. Mihai admits to “slapping” the children. The state sees no distinction between that and hitting. He does. And so the war begins.

A Culture Clash That Refuses to Pick a Side

What makes Fjord so disquieting — and so accomplished — is that Mungiu genuinely doesn’t tip his hand. He’s not making a film about the evils of religious conservatism, nor is he making a persecution drama that asks you to root for the family against an overreaching state. He’s doing something harder: building a scenario where every party has a point, and every party is also, in some way, wrong.

The children’s testimony, which becomes the most damning evidence against their father, may have been the result of a language-related miscommunication. The child welfare workers who enter Lisbet’s home and calmly tell her they’ll be leaving with all of her children say, with total sincerity, “We’re here to help.” Both of those things can be true at once. That tension is where Fjord lives for its entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime, and Mungiu holds it without flinching.

As the case grows into something larger — Mihai begins posting emotional YouTube videos calling for global solidarity from fellow Evangelicals, whipping up conservative protests across Europe — the film asks an uncomfortable question about what happens when someone who may have genuinely wronged their children is also genuinely being persecuted for their beliefs. The courtroom scenes, critics note, occasionally over-explain what the earlier scenes had left beautifully ambiguous. But even there, Mungiu is working at a level most filmmakers can’t reach.

Stan, last seen at Cannes for The Apprentice, gives a performance that is almost aggressively unsympathetic — and that’s entirely the point. Mihai is a wronged man and a man in the wrong, sometimes simultaneously. He’s stiff, joyless, visibly uncomfortable even saying the words “we’ve been blessed” to new colleagues. Yet when the camera holds on him as his children are taken from his home, something real and devastating breaks through. Reinsve, meanwhile, plays Lisbet like a shaken willow — a woman who returned to her homeland only to find she no longer belongs to it, her secular Norwegian roots now buried under two decades of religious traditionalism that her neighbors resent her for.

Mungiu at His Most Precise

This is Mungiu’s fifth film to compete at Cannes — his first was 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which took the Palme d’Or in 2007 — and his first set entirely outside Romania. That shift, it turns out, suits him. So much of his work has circled the friction between Eastern and Western Europe, between tradition and progress, between the individual and the institution, that dropping his lens into Norway feels less like a departure than a natural expansion.

Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru, who also shot R.M.N. and Graduation, frames the Norwegian landscape in sleety, silvery blues that never quite warm up. Wide, unbroken takes capture the whole community at once — neighbors who are also employers, teachers, lawyers, and potential adversaries, all crammed into the same expansive frame. There are actual avalanches in the background of several scenes, gathering and tumbling down the hill behind the local school. Nobody is particularly concerned. It’s the human nature inside those walls, Mungiu suggests, that’s the real disaster in progress.

The supporting cast holds its own throughout. Markus Scarth Tønseth plays Mats, the next-door neighbor and school principal whose friendly demeanor barely conceals his discomfort with the family beside him. His stepdaughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) forms a fast, intense bond with Elia — the kind of closeness that Mihai, who teaches his children that a family can only begin with a man and a woman, watches with visible unease. Lisa Carlehed is particularly fine as the neighbor-turned-lawyer who takes on Lisbet’s case after the first attorney quits in frustration.

Fjord is the kind of film that stays with you not because it answers anything, but because it keeps asking. “What does it mean to be a good neighbor?” is the question Mungiu keeps circling, in a world where everyone — the state, the church, the parents, the children, even the audience — believes they already know. NEON will release it in U.S. theaters later this year. Whatever your politics, clear your schedule.

The post Cannes 2026: Sebastian Stan Shines in Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’ appeared first on Cream.