Dreams (Sex Love): Norwegian trilogy concludes with a candid story of teen desire

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

There’s a certain harmony between contemporary Norwegian cinema and literature. Karl Ove Knausgård, one of the most influential writers of autofiction, hails from Norway, and has benefitted from its handsome grants for cultural production. Many examples of modern Nordic cinema have a Knausgårdian quality – sharing a propensity for psychological drama and deep investigations of the self. The Worst Person in the World (2021) director Joachim Trier’s films don’t hide their literary influences and inheritance, nor do the films of Dag Johan Haugerud, whose work has even more of an affinity with the slippery attributes of literary memoir writing.  

Acclaimed for decades in Norway, Haugerud has broken through internationally with his Sex Love Dreams film trilogy, with Dreams – the last chapter to premiere – being awarded the Berlinale’s Golden Bear from Todd Haynes’ jury. The voice-over from its 17-year-old lead Johanne (Ella Øverbye) starts from the film‘s opening moments, and essentially doesn’t cease, skipping from descriptions to impressions and forward to speculation, swatting aside the false requirement that films should “show, not tell”. The presence of the voiceover melds into an in-film literary text, written by Johanne, that’s spilling over with alarming revelations, a hot potato ‘MacGuffin’ instigating conflict between its four main characters. At the Berlinale awards ceremony, Haugerud spoke on the importance of reading: “It broadens your mind, and it’s good for you.”   

But this approach from Haugerud (who is credited as sole screenwriter) also provides a canny distraction from his more bizarre decisions, which push the film into the realm of poker-faced comedy. Johanne is a highly intelligent teen from a cultivated Oslo background, who experiences the first pangs of mature love when meeting her new French teacher, the similarly named Johanna (Selome Emnetu), whose training and passion is in the textile arts. A time jump from the moment the student gamely stalks her to her apartment, where the teacher enthusiastically welcomes her in, takes us one year into the future, where Johanne has seemingly produced a 95-page account of their ensuing romantic affair.  

We might question the absolute candidness of Johanne wanting to show the manuscript to her feminist poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and more conservative mum Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) – surely, a sensitive young person is inclined to discretion? But this choice, leading to the book’s actual publication as a provocative autofiction text, is Haugerud’s method for igniting the discourse he relishes, where these articulate characters can probe the false boundaries that repress their vibrant sexual imaginations – an outcome less prurient and more disinterestedly analytical than it sounds.   

Dreams (Sex Love) is an invitation to spend time with and think alongside Haugerud’s liberated characters, and it’s a welcome one, however artificial and unlikely his framing can sometimes feel.