How well do you truly know your neighbor? How much do you actually care to?

These are the questions at the heart of Fjord, a fraught drama that becomes about opposing families caught on either side of a “culture war” while seeming to care rather little for the people themselves. Centering on a religious Romanian family who immigrate to a chilly remote village in Norway, where they soon find themselves coming under scrutiny by the more progressive community when suspected of abusing their children, it’s a film that feels designed to challenge the preconceptions of all who see it. But rather than succeed at doing so, it ends up painting with far too broad a brush, capturing plenty of beautiful, haunting landscapes while leaving the actual people populating them at a perpetual distance. Even with Marvel star Sebastian Stan giving one of his best, most understated performances to date alongside the always magnificent Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World, there’s no shaking just how cold and alienating it all becomes the longer that it goes on.

Whether this is the ultimate goal is something worth interrogating, but it’s still a shame to see so much talent squandered on something so surprisingly shallow. Even if the point is to keep us in the dark so that we’re left to reflect on our assumptions about the two perspectives at odds in the film, the results of the film’s choices still mean we’re looking down on the world from a thousand feet up in the sky.

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