Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” which won the Palme d’Or as the best film of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, will be released in theaters on Oct. 9, Neon announced Wednesday.
Of note, the film is getting the same release date as past Neon-released Palme winners “Parasite,” “Anora” and “Anatomy of a Fall.” The trio went on to score Oscar nominations, with “Parasite” and “Anora” winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
Neon acquired the film last year. “Fjord” centers on a Romanian man (Sebastian Stan) and his Norwegian wife (Renate Reinsve), who move to a remote Norwegian village and are accused of abusing their children. The film received a 10-minute standing ovation after its Cannes premiere. Both Stan and Reinsve, who had previously starred together in A24’s “A Different Man,” shed tears during the movie’s warm reception.
While “Fjord” left some critics cold, our own Ben Croll was intrigued by the movie as a prospect as much as anything else, describing it as “an object of unusual curiosity, as the project takes him outside his home country, into two new languages, and alongside a pair of recent Oscar nominees who have staked their own claims on the Cannes red carpet.”
But our critic was ultimately beguiled by the movie – and by Mungiu’s slipperiness as a filmmaker.
“The filmmaker is too canny to come down on any single position, though his best instincts emerge more clearly beyond the didactic strictures of the courtroom, and instead in the stifled cries of a father watching his children taken away, or as his once-local wife, gone native in religious rigidity, is made to pay the price. In ‘Fjord,’ as in his best work, he builds entire systems that grind his characters down.”
