Fjord      Director: Cristian MungiuCert: NoneGenre: DramaStarring: Sebastian Stan, Renate ReinsveRunning Time: 2 hrs 26 minsNobody understands mob mentality quite like Cristian Mungiu. From the groupthink roasted in Tales from the Golden Age to the unnerving town-hall sequence of RMN, the Romanian auteur has a knack for exposing foolish social faultlines. In this spirit, Fjord is a fiercely probing drama concerning culture, religion and the limits of tolerance in contemporary Europe. Set in a remote Norwegian village, the knotty drama follows a Romanian immigrant couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, played with shaken constraint by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, whose deeply conservative Christian beliefs place them at odds with the progressive community around them. When bruises are discovered on their teenage daughter, a child-protection investigation spirals into a legal and political battle that threatens to destroy the family. Mungiu refuses easy answers as questions of parenting, faith and state intervention sprawl into the wider, murkier world of social media. His screenplay carefully exposes the chasm between Romanian and Norwegian cultural norms, and how liberal doctrine coalesces into something less tolerant than the faiths it seeks to replace. Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty and avalanches of Norwegian precipices, Fjord sustains nail-biting tension across its lengthy running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.