"When the credits rolled on Cristian Mungiu's latest, Fjord, at the end of a screening at Cannes, the person sitting next to me gasped " Sebastian Stan!?" with the horrified delight of someone who had not been remotely aware of the identity of its leading man. Stan isn't exactly unrecognizable in the film, though with his glasses and his shaved hair, he looks a lot more regular joe than superhero. It's more that you don't expect a Marvel star to turn up in a film from Romania's most talented social miserabilist, the director who won the 2007 Palme d'Or for the astonishing, excruciating abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days."
"Then again, Stan, who was born and spent the first eight years of his life in Romania, has been pointedly seeking out edgier and more challenging work between his bouts with the cape, from Aaron Schimberg's droll indie fable A Different Man to his turn as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Fjord is Stan's most ambitious turn yet, not because he performs half the role in Romanian but because he deftly plays a character, Mihai Gheorghiu, who constantly tests the audience's sympathies, even as he and his family find themselves in the center of a domestic nightmare."
"Mihai, an aeronautical engineer, is Romanian while his nurse wife, Lisbet ( Sentimental Value's Renate Reinsve, who also starred alongside Stan in A Different Man), is Norwegian. While they had previously been raising their five children, the youngest of whom is just a baby, in Bucharest, they recently relocated to a village stunningly situated alongside a fjord in Norway to be closer to Lisbet's mother. When someone introduces themselves to the Gheorghius by noting that they're pretty much all neighbors around here, it's a friendly welcome but also a statement of fact."
"Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth), the principal at the school the four older siblings attend, literally lives across the street from the family. Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), the rebellious classmate"
Sebastian Stan appears in Fjord, a film by Cristian Mungiu, in a role that challenges expectations of a Marvel star. Stan plays Mihai Gheorghiu, an aeronautical engineer whose family relocates from Bucharest to a Norwegian village beside a fjord to be near Lisbet’s mother. The move places the family in close contact with neighbors, including the school principal who lives across the street. The story centers on how Mihai and his family become trapped in a domestic nightmare while the film continually pressures viewers’ sympathies. Renate Reinsve plays Lisbet, and the film includes interactions with school and community figures that intensify tension.
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