The majestic Norwegian landscape looms large in writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (B), but the moral avalanche unfolding on its terrain proves even more imposing. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move their five children to a remote village where their  conservative beliefs and disciplinary practices attract child-welfare authorities. Mungiu denies audiences an easy position from which to judge the stoic parents. Stan’s father can be controlling and deeply troubling, yet the authorities appear so convinced of their own moral superiority that compassion vanishes from the process. Each interaction shifts viewer sympathies without erasing the harm at the story’s center. Stan buries fear and humiliation beneath a rigid exterior, while Reinsve quietly devastates as a woman trapped between her husband, children and homeland. The long takes and clinical pacing effectively tighten the screws, although the film keeps underlining points it has already made clear. Cold, controlled and deliberately provocative, Mungiu’s film plays like a combustible discussion guide for the world’s most contentious talkback. Its argument lands: Empathy matters most when every side believes it has already won the moral debate.