DREAMS (SEX LOVE). To Fall in Love in Oslo

A Scandinavian comedy may not be an exceptionally rare phenomenon, but a genre driven by humor is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the cinema of this region. And when it does appear, it’s usually in an absurd (like Trollhunter, Adam’s Apples) or dark (Rams, The Mother of Mine is Sitting in the Back) form. A classic dramedy from Northern Europe is therefore something of an oddity. Over the past twelve months, Dag Johan Haugerud has emerged as the king of this subgenre. His Dreams (Sex Love), awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin, concludes a trilogy that also includes Sex and Love, both from 2024.

All three films represent a talky style of cinema, filled with reflections on life and understated humor. The triptych links three narratively unrelated stories, bound together by the Oslo setting, partially intersecting characters, and a shared focus on interpersonal relationships in a romantic and erotic context. The narrative of Dreams (Sex Love) is built around the voiceover of teenage Johanne, who tells the story of her infatuation with her Norwegian and French teacher, Johanna—who moonlights as a knitting tutor. What we hear from the girl is the content of her autobiographical novel, written under the influence of her feelings. When she shows the manuscript to her writer grandmother, who then shares it with Johanne’s mother, a sequence of reflections and seemingly minor, yet important events unfolds—events that gradually shift the innocent nature of her bond with the older teacher into something more complex.

Dreams (Sex Love) becomes a wry chronicle not so much of falling in love, but of diverging perspectives on what occurred, and the narratives that grow from them.   The strength of Haugerud’s film—just like in the preceding Love—lies in its well-written, lifelike, and effortlessly flowing dialogue. Listening to the soft stream of the characters’ speech feels like eavesdropping on an intimate conversation between close friends, making it easy to immerse oneself in the story told in Dreams. The superb performances by Elli Øverbye, Ane Dahl Torp, Anne Marit Jacobsen, and Selome Emnetu bring the screenplay’s characters to life. Upon their shoulders, the director weaves a compelling tale about feelings, struggles with identity, and overlapping perspectives that can turn the most trivial matter into a life-altering explosion.

All this is wrapped in tender cinematography portraying the somewhat dreamy rhythm of Oslo, complementing the depiction of contemporary women embedded in the cityscape and intertwined with the urban organism of tangled human stories. Haugerud deliberately positions himself within a tradition dating back to the French New Wave, particularly the morally infused stories of Éric Rohmer. He creates dialogue-heavy, somewhat diffuse films that serve to extract deeper reflections from everyday life.

The trilogy is varied: Sex is arguably the most humorous of the three, but also narratively the heaviest, bogged down by an overabundance of plotlines and repetition. Love offers a more cohesive story, marked by an empathetic gaze and brilliantly ordinary dialogue. Dreams (Sex Love) leans closest to traditional drama, though it still leaves room for subtle situational humor. The third film wraps up Haugerud’s exploration of sex, relationships, and feelings for others and oneself with an intelligent meditation on the nature of infatuation and falling in love, completing the humanistic portrait of love life that he constructs across the trilogy. While the entire trilogy is well worth recommending, Dreams may serve as its flagship, showcasing everything that is best in the Norwegian director’s style.