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Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 Filmfest Hamburg coverage. Love opens in theaters on May 16.

It takes confidence to name your film––simply and so very unspecifically––Love. Michael Haneke could get away with it for giving us the classic that is Amour. Gaspar Noé, on the other hand, came across poorly in his take on the L-word. Does Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud have something vital to say on the subject? In a breezy tone that soothes rather than shocks, yes. His film contemplates the many forms and possibilities of love while luxuriating in the Nordic vistas of Oslo. Not the most groundbreaking filmmaking, perhaps, but it’s pure cinematic balm that celebrates the basic, beautiful human need to connect. Fans of Joachim Trier’s work and Linklater’s Before trilogy, take note.

Itself part of a thematic trilogy about sex, dreams, and love, the...

The insistent warmth of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love, one third of his Oslo Stories trilogy, can be off-putting at first. The characters smile and wait for each other to finish speaking before faultlessly articulating what’s on their minds. The camera gazes lovingly at the Oslo skyline in symmetrical compositions taken from offshore. The scenes are lit and staged with a clarity so stark that the aesthetics almost verge on the plainness of daytime TV. Peder Kjellsby’s score seems to be running in overdrive, flagrantly outlining the emotional valence of a scene.

But once one surrenders to the gentle rhythms of Jense Christian Fodstad’s editing, to the frankness with which Haugerud’s characters approach life and which he approaches the material, the film is utterly enrapturing. The apparent simplicity serves to highlight the rich complexity of human emotion that Love celebrates. By the end, it’s tempting...

"Will this end in a sexual fusion of the three?" Strand Releasing has unveiled the first official US trailer for the film titled Love, part of the Norwegian film trilogy called The Oslo Trilogy made by filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud. This just premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival last year, the second one following Sex (at Berlinale 2024) and Dreams (at Berlinale 2025). Love focuses on two colleagues at an Oslo hospital — Marianne, a straight (and straitlaced) doctor, and Tor, a gay male nurse, who are avoiding conventional relatiosnhips. Both single, they cross paths and confide in each other: Marianne confesses her desire to be more adventurous and open in her encounters with men; Tor shares his fatigue with Grindr hook-ups. Their conversations form the heart of exploration of desire and emotional fulfillment. The idea of spontaneous intimacy, and questioning societal norms... Starring Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Marte Engebrigtsen, Lars Jacob Holm,...

Dag Johan Haugerud: 'We worked with some textile artists. It’s very apparent what the wool is doing to us, the feeling of wool - carrying it on the skin and seeing it as well' Photo: © Agnete Brun/courtesy of Berlinale

Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex Dreams Love trilogy is an ambitious work that explores the multifaceted nature of desire in the modern world. The three films are stand-alone works, although there is a common character, Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), who appears in all three and whose character comes more to the fore in the third part, Love, which considers different attitudes to sex through the prism of a woman considering casual liaisons. Sex, meanwhile, focuses on a man whose life is shaken up by an unexpected sexual encounter, while Dreams zones in on a teenager’s sexual memoir which may or may not be a factual document of her relationship with her teacher.

There’s a lot to love about Love (or Kjaelighet), but the generic English title is not one of them. That handle will get this confused with works by Gaspar Noé and Judd Apatow, among others, and could potentially delay viewers finding it through search engines. Which would be a real shame, because Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s dramedy, which premiered at Venice, is a refreshing delight.

Honest, thoughtful, and daringly talky as it observes modern dating customs in the age of apps, it deserves further exposure beyond the festival circuit. The second part of a thematically but not narratively linked trilogy — its predecessor Sex played in Berlin, and Dreams is yet to come — it’s sure to find traction among viewers who groove to upscale, nuanced Scandi fare like The Worst Person in the World, the sort of romantic schmooze-fests that French cinema excels at and Richard Linklater’s Before series.

We live in a transitional era regarding relationship politics, as more people carve romantic and sexual lives for themselves outside the prescribed trajectory of love, marriage, procreation and nuclear family. The emergence of LGBT identities into the mainstream has had much to do with this, of course, but our collective understanding of opposite-sex partnerships — those once deemed merely “normal” — is evolving too, alive to the complexities of bisexuality and open relationships. Screen romance, however, remains largely behind this curve, which is why Dag Johan Haugerud’s new film “Love” feels, in its quiet, conversational way, rather radical: a tender, gently observed relationship study that places as much stock in casual sex as in seeking a soulmate. Following two very different medical professionals on their contrasting quests for intimacy, it’s the rare romantic drama that concedes one person’s happily-ever-after is not necessarily another’s.

The fourth feature by Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Haugerud,...

Sex is never just sex, says Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a middle-aged psychologist Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) meets on the ferry between central Oslo and Nakholmen, the island where they happen to have neighboring houses. Tor, a nurse who works with cancer patients, looks sceptical.

Tor has had a lot of sex, often generated by Grinder and occasionally on this ferry; it’s a thrill, he tells his colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), to do a search for the nearest person on the app and look up to see the person on your screen looking right back at you. Marianne gives it a try on Tinder and meets a man who tells her he is married. Does he feel guilty? Yes, extremely guilty! “You’ve ruined it a bit, now,” he says accusingly. Bjorn was right. Sex is never just sex.

Dag Johan Haugerud’s discursive film is a companion piece to his earlier Sex.