It was announced today that Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, the deftly served social-political drama that won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or last month, will open stateside on Friday, October 9th — a prestige film clearly looking at award-season consideration.
Cosstarring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a strictly religious couple-with-kids who fall under woke scrutiny and legal prosecution when they move to a small Norwegian village, will instantly and indisputably become a leading nominee for Best Int’l Feature Oscar.
Mungiu’s film will also be subjected to relentless side-eye treatment from woke critics who will try to “take it down’, so to speak — a death-of-a-thousand cuts diminishment campaign that won’t involve angry attacks as much as a dismissive chip-chip-chisel-chisel strategy. They’ll do what they can to kill Fjord by calling it well made but lacking dramatic oomph, low-key, “doesn’t take sides”, etc.
All the big reptilian woke lawyers — Richard Brody, Justin Chang, Jessica Kiang, Manohla Dargis, David Ehrlich, Richard Lawson, Wesley Morris….they will all go after Fjord with fine scalpels because — this is key — this brilliant film is not so much a portrait of a progressive community trying to subject a conservative couple to the political lash as a larger-canvas indictment of international woke oppression.
The Critical Drinker, Kyle Smith and Armond White will almost certainly adore this film. Uh-oh…saying stuff like this will only get Fjord into more trouble!
In the immediate wake of Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or on 5.23.26, woke-mob pushback was voiced by respected film critic B. Ruby Rich in a 5.24 Facebook post.
Rich passed along a second-hand observation (originally shared, she said, by “an esteemed U.S. curator”) that called Fjord “the MAGA film.”
Three days later came another shot across the Fjord bow, this time from identity-driven New Yorker critic Justin Chang.
In a 5.27 piece titled “All the Films in Competition at Cannes 2026, Ranked from Best to Worst“, Chang dismissively ranked Fjord, the festival’s only home-run knockout in my view, as the 11th best film he saw in Cannes, while snooting the following sentence: “More than a few wondered if Mungiu, whose Romanian-set films have forcefully criticized religious fundamentalism, had suddenly moved rightward as his camera drifted west [to Norway].”
HE interjection: “More than a few” alludes to the same people B. Ruby Rich and her “esteemed U.S. curator” had been chatting with in Cannes. The notion that Mungiu’s social-political perceptions may have “suddenly moved rightward” is an oblique, carefully phrased, typically Chang-ian way of saying Mungiu’s thinking (on this film at least) may have gone MAGA.