Film reviews: Fjord | Prima Facie
Starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as an Evangelical couple who fall foul of Norway’s more progressive laws, Cristian Mingiu’s drama Fjord is fascinating, gripping stuff, writes Alistair Harkness
An unrecognisable Sebastian Stan and Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve pitch themselves headlong into the culture war in Fjord. Inspired by a true story, Cristian Mingiu’s Palme d’Or-winning drama casts them as an Evangelical couple who fall foul of Norway’s more progressive values and laws after relocating from Romania with their young family, only for their more punitive parenting style to land them in hot water when unexplained bruising on their eldest daughter’s back results in child abuse allegations.
Are they really a danger to their children or victims of state overreach? Mingiu — shooting in the same unadorned, social-realist style he’s used since his harrowing abortion drama 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days back in 2007 — deliberately withholds information to make us question everything as the case escalates.
Yet within this button-pushing exploration of dogmatic intransigence is an even stranger film, one that plays around with horror movie tropes — including a casually introduced religious miracle — to probe at parental fears regarding their children’s emerging sexuality. It’s fascinating, gripping stuff.
Despite boasting a commanding turn from Cynthia Erivo as a barrister who finds the legal system not fit for purpose when she’s sexually assaulted by a colleague she’s also dating, Prima Facie sabotages its own case with some horribly clunky filmmaking choices.
Based on screenwriter Suzie Miller’s acclaimed one-woman play, it falls at the first hurdle of a stage-to-screen adaptation by transposing the main character’s internal monologue to an unnecessarily intrusive voiceover. Thus we have Erivo repeatedly forced to articulate the thoughts and actions of her character when she’s perfectly capable of communicating these through performance alone.
This isn’t helped by director Susanna White cutting in honking visual metaphors or staging the opening act like a corny romantic drama replete with cringy sex scenes. It does briefly get good in the immediate aftermath of the aforementioned assault, but the courtroom showdown that eventually follows struggles to rise above a polemic.
Fjord and Prima Facie are in cinemas from 13 November
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