‘Dreams (Sex Love)’ review: Dag Johan Haugerud concludes his trilogy at Berlin

Dir. Dag Johan Haugerud. Norway 2025. 110mins

“My life is in a cloud,” announces a young woman in voice-over at the start of Dreams – and part of the pleasure, and at times frustration, of this Norwegian psychological drama lies in feeling our way through the mist to some sort of clarity. This is the final part of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Dreams/Love trilogy, competing in Berlin a year after Sex played here in Panorama and a few months after Love featured in Venice. Comprising three dramas that are thematically related but with different casts, the set ends with a female coming-of-age story – here, an intellectual maturing as much as a sexual and emotional one.

The four leads tesselate perfectly in a tightly-matched quartet

Elegantly styled, sensitively acted and crafted with keen intelligence, Dreams is likely to appeal to upmarket niche audiences although, even for committed art-house goers, the very literary register of both dialogue and construction may feel a little rarefied. At the very least, however, Dreams deserves admiration, with a terrific, highly affecting lead from up-and-coming Ella Øverbye, previously in Haugerud’s 2019 Beware Of Children. 

Øverbye plays teenage school student Johanna, who narrates the film’s first section in voice-over. This comprises Johanna’s account of falling in love with her new language teacher (Selome Enmetu), an artsy, bohemian, charismatic young woman who also happens to be called Johanne – spelled differently, but similar enough to convince her pupil that the two have a connection. She decides to pay her a visit at home.

Now, the narrative jumps a year. Whatever happened between Johanna and Johanne is over, and the student has written a full confessional account of it. She prints out a copy for her grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) to read, on the understanding that it will remain their secret. But Karin feels that she must discuss the contents with Johanna’s mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), and the two older women muse over the complexities of the manuscript and its contents – over how much is real and how much invented.

Later, things acquire another level of delicacy when there is talk of the text being published – with Karin, an established poet now in a creative trough, wondering how she feels about being eclipsed by her granddaughter’s burgeoning talent. Meanwhile, it is only at this late stage that the narrative jumps back to show events elided earlier. 

Apart from the sensitivity of Øverbye’s Johanna, teenage emotions forever flickering through perplexing changes, the four leads tesselate perfectly in a tightly-matched quartet. The intricacy that Haugerud weaved in Love, where he mapped the relations between a network of different characters, operates here on a more compressed canvas, but to no less intricate effect. 

Once again, Haugerud uses the Oslo landscape very effectively, although Norwegian viewers will be best qualified to judge how well he makes specific locations signify. He also strikingly breaks with realism at key points – notably when Karin dreams about being caught in a dance performance on a woodland staircase. This is a very handsome film in DoP Cecilie Semec’s use of sometimes radiant light and in its use of distinctive colour.

One problem, however, is that the manicured elegance of the design can make this feel too much like the drama of an enclosed, self-regarding middle-class milieu. Look beyond that to the complexities of the feelings, and the different ways in which Haugerud and his young protagonist narrate them, and there is emotional intelligence to be found.