This article appeared in the June 27, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Sex (Dag Johan Haugerud, 2024)

In recommending Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Dreams/Love trilogy to casual filmgoers who haven’t yet seen it, I’ve struggled to avoid a brace of comparative statements: 1) it’s kind of like the Three Colors trilogy, and 2) it’s not at all like the Three Colors trilogy. A veritable art-house event in the ’90s, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s elegant triptych of Continental discontent remains the exemplar for multi-installment filmmaking not bound to a serial narrative. It’s the obvious analogue for Haugerud’s trio of films navigating the complex emotional lives of various middle-class Norwegians. Each entry is self-contained—connective characters or story threads are few and incidental—but cumulatively, the three reveal a larger psychological and sociological inquiry into the gulf between the intricacies of human desire and the binaries of social conditioning.

Cumulative how, though? Kieślowski’s films instructed you how to watch them by way of their binding flag design. Blue’s mournful study in solitude segued to White’s acrid couple comedy, which bloomed into Red’s hopeful ode to wider community. Sex/Dreams/Love is more amorphous, its structural flexibility already proven by the peculiarities of festival programming. Though Haugerud conceived and shot them in the order stated by the trilogy’s title, the European fest circuit had other ideas. Sex premiered at the Berlinale in February 2024; Love wound up debuting in Competition at Venice in September 2024; five months later, in February 2025, Dreams won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. Meanwhile, the films’ U.S. distributor, Strand Releasing, has opted for its own order of exhibition: first comes Love, then Sex, then Dreams. If anyone had been so cavalier with the sequencing of the tricolore when releasing Kieślowski’s films, the French would have declared war.

Does it matter? In promotional interviews for the films, Haugerud has steered clear of prescriptive statements, and for good reason. Watched in any order, the trilogy delivers the same collective examination of fluid sexuality and contemporary queerness, not least since each film closes, in its own way, on a note of quietly euphoric optimism. “Sex-positive” has become an overused term by critics in this still-dry era for sex on screen, applied too liberally to just about any film demonstrating erotic abandon marginally above Hays Code levels. But it’s a term that Haugerud’s trilogy truly merits, with its delicate characterizations of women and men, across a broad age spectrum, whose lives are actively enriched by carnal curiosity. Sex? Dreams? Love? All good, individually and in any combination.

Still, I find it hard not to parse the films in the order I saw them in over the course of a year, beginning with its most male-focused entry: Sex, in which an ostensibly straight, middle-aged chimney sweep (Jan Gunnar Røise) is startled in the course of a day’s work to find himself propositioned by a male client, and even more surprised to find himself impulsively accepting. To him, the experience qualifies as a novelty, interesting and not unpleasurable, rather than the trigger for a sexual identity crisis. “One beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic,” he explains to his wife after immediately confessing all, though she’s rather less sanguine about the situation.

He finds a more sympathetic confidant in a colleague (Thorbjorn Harr), another straight man of a certain age, and it’s on their nonchalant break-room chat about the incident—rather than the rupturing incident itself—that the film wittily opens. Not for the last time in the trilogy, Haugerud introduces events that drastically alter a character’s sense of self via after-the-fact conversations and reflections; he’s as interested in how we share such personal revelations with others as in how we process them ourselves.

His colleague, in turn, has his own non-heteronormative secret to divulge: he’s been having recurring dreams in which he’s perceived as a woman. Again, this does not precipitate a crisis about his gender identity in his waking life, though it does prompt a consideration of the strictures of traditionally masculine presentation, and how he might free himself from them.

Unlike in the other two films, the principals in Sex are not named; in tandem they represent an archetype to be subtly reshaped. Yet there’s no lofty irony, either, in Sex’s gentle portrayal of how two securely straight cis men can experience a manner of queer awakening, though there is tacit acknowledgement of how their degrees of privilege—as white people in stable households in a liberal European country—make this awakening a safe one, free from severe consequences.

Where women are bemused peripheral figures in Sex, female desire is foregrounded in the other two films. In Love, doctor Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is exclusively into men, though her friendship at work with hospital nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen)—a gay habitual cruiser, predominantly interested in casual, no-strings sex—leads her to rethink her relationship-oriented style of dating. As in Sex, a little queer interrogation opens up the porous bounds of heterosexuality.

Dreams, meanwhile, is the closest of the three to a wholly queer narrative, though the coming of age of Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a 17-year-old infatuated with a female teacher, isn’t a straightforward coming-out arc. When her mother, attempting to be progressive, calls her daughter’s inappropriate crush a “queer awakening,” Johanne is quick to caution her against definitive labels. She’s inexperienced in matters of love and sex alike: all identities are open to her, a freedom some may argue is queer in itself, though Johanne—still literally writing the story of her life in a novelistic journal—has yet to determine a conclusion.

There’s a comfort in this exploration without threat that extends to the very language of Haugerud’s filmmaking, which abounds in soft textures without feeling bland. Cecilie Semec’s camerawork trades in light, lucent pastels; Anna Berg’s jazz score is flutey and floaty, while Haugerud and editor Jens Christian Fodstad shape dialogue scenes with the probing patience of a therapist. Indeed, it’s the character of soft-spoken gay psychologist Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm) who sews Love and Dreams together: in the former, he’s tenderly supported through illness by Tor; in the latter, he provides late counsel to Johanne.

It is when viewed in this order—Sex, Love, Dreams—that the trilogy arguably takes on its tidiest arc, as its reverses through stages of sexual self-realization, beginning with two older men granting themselves belated permission to experiment and identify as they wish, and ending on an adolescent coming to the same understanding at a more formative point in life. What begins as a study in male agency and ego transforms via the middle film into a wholly female perspective, to the point that scarcely any men (Bjørn notwithstanding) appear on screen at all in Dreams. Such patterns seem an accident of my own watching experience, not intended or built in by Haugerud, but these delicate, permeable films permit all manner of subjective projections. The choose-your-own-adventure fluidity of this trilogy is right in line with its inclusive, elastic understanding of modern queer lives.

Guy Lodge is the U.K. film critic for Variety, and a contributing writer to The Observer, The Guardian, and Sight and Sound.