Old Yorker

Dag Johan Haugerud (2024)

This Norwegian film – the first in writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s ‘Oslo stories’ trilogy – is immediately unusual.   The two protagonists are twenty-first-century chimney sweeps, for a start.  After opening shots of them at work on city rooftops, then swimming with other colleagues in a public pool, Haugerud’s camera moves inside a multi-storey building to a room, where it settles on one of the pair.  The camera doesn’t move for several minutes as this man, seated at a table drinking coffee, describes a dream he’s had, his description punctuated by questions from an unseen man, in a tone of voice that’s calm, interested and sympathetic.  Hearing about other people’s dreams can be a tedious business but not in Sex.  The dreamer encountered a figure whom he first thought was God, then Anni-Frid from ABBA, but eventually realised was David Bowie, who perceived the dreamer as a woman.  ‘He was taking charge … and that felt so good’:  the encounter didn’t involve any physical contact but the dreamer in retrospect is troubled.  He isn’t a Bowie fan but is sure the dream must mean something – that these things don’t come out of nowhere.  His listener, disagreeing, proceeds to give an example of how they do, and in real life.  The camera now moves across the table and stays with this other man, who matter-of-factly explains that, just yesterday and for the first time ever, he had sex with another man – a work client – in the man’s home.  Although the dreamer responds quietly, he’s clearly disturbed by his friend’s news.  From this point on, the camera is relatively more animated, too, moving between the two black-uniformed men as they continue to talk.

The dreamer, the listener … don’t they have names?  Not really.  On a Wikipedia cast list, the gay sex initiate is ‘Chimney Sweep’ and the dreamer is ‘CEO’ (he owns the business); on IMDb’s list, they’re Feier (sweep) and Avdelingsleder (head of department) respectively.  These middle-aged men are both married; whereas Wikipedia labels the women in their lives simply as chimney sweep’s wife and CEO’s wife, IMDb acknowledges that they have jobs too – their characters are Revisor (auditor) and Sosionom (social worker).  Neither taxonomy makes sense in the context of the film.  There’s no evidence that either man sees his wife as a mere appendage.  We don’t see either woman at work, except for the auditor briefly on her laptop at home, and there’s nothing to suggest that their spouses, let alone their children, define them in terms of the jobs they do.  Nor are the two husbands and fathers defined that way.  Haugerud’s cryptic anonymity is one of Sex‘s few mildly irritating features, at least when you come to write about the film.  I’ll give the four characters the forenames of the excellent actors playing them – Jan Gunnar Røise, Thorbjørn Harr, Siri Forberg and Birgitte Larsen.

Thorbjørn is shocked by Jan’s revelation at a personal level and as his boss:  it’s not on, he reminds his employee, to have sex with clients.  Jan knows that but points out the client propositioned him.  He initially said no; it was only after leaving the house and reflecting on the client’s invitation that he changed his mind and returned.  What followed was ‘mind-blowing’ but Jan doesn’t think it means he’s at all homosexually inclined.  He nevertheless asks Thorbjørn to respect the confidence, adding that he hasn’t told anyone else, ‘apart from my wife, of course’.  What did she say, asks Thorbjørn, amazed for a second time.  She was surprised, Jan replies, but he has assured her that the sex doesn’t mean he’s gay or that he was being unfaithful to her.  When Jan returns home after the chat with Thorbjørn, there follows another lengthy static shot, as he talks with his wife Siri, and she tells him how deeply betrayed she feels.  Jan sits sideview to the camera, Siri with her back to it and motionless:  it’s only when the camera starts to move that we can see as well as hear her distress.  Jan’s clearly sorry to have hurt his wife yet puzzled that he has.  He insists there won’t be any repetition of the incident (and, after all, ‘One beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic’).  That evening, the couple drive with their two pre-adolescent sons to a garden centre; nothing is said to the boys but in private Siri can’t stop discussing with Jan what the episode means for the future of their relationship.

In contrast to the virtually non-speaking roles for Jan and Siri’s boys, there’s plenty of talk between Thorbjørn and his only child, (named!) teenager Klaus (Theo Dahl).  Klaus plays piano in the school orchestra; his father sings in a church choir, which will join forces with the orchestra in a forthcoming concert.  Thorbjørn is lined up for a solo but worries that his voice seems to be developing a higher register.  In Klaus’s company, he visits a vocal coach (Nasrin Khusrawi), who thinks the problem is stress related.  She recommends tongue-stretching exercises and reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.  On another occasion, as they’re walking home, Thorbjørn and Klaus are buttonholed by two women, a mother (Heidi Berget) and daughter (Sarah Oskarsen), who want a fridge moved into their house.  In helping to do this, Klaus traps and injures his hand, resulting in a visit to the family doctor (Anne-Marie Ottersen).  Thorbjørn accompanies Klaus, who mentions that his father has developed a skin rash, which the doctor insists on examining.

Father and son are notably frank with each other throughout – and the family doctor, like almost all Sex‘s significant characters, is talkative – in her case, to a remarkably discursive degree.  She regales Thorbjørn and Klaus with the tale of two architects, a young male couple:  one was obsessed by the beauty of his partner’s upper back; the other, knowing this, had the words ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’ tattooed there as a birthday present for his lover; the latter couldn’t conceal his disappointment, not least because his other half chose a font style suggestive of Le Corbusier rather than Frank Lloyd Wright.  Although the partnership survived, the moral of the doctor’s story is that surface details can profoundly complicate relationships.  In Thorbjørn’s interview with the voice therapist, the talk soon turns existential.  And in the domestic exchanges between Jan and Siri and, in due course, between Thorbjørn and Birgitte, the characters show a consistent ability to ask incisive questions that take the conversation deeper.

All this confirms the striking impression made by the film’s opening exchange about Thorbjørn’s dream.  Jan alertly picks up that his friend’s account has included two different versions of what David Bowie was supposedly doing in the dream before he noticed Thorbjørn.  Acknowledging this, Thorbjørn says it tends to happen when you recount a dream:  details can change or be invented to make the account more coherent overall.  These chimney sweeps can sound like trained psychoanalysts.  The dialogue in Sex is well written and the delivery of it flawlessly naturalistic but as the film proceeds, you’re increasingly aware that Haugerud’s priority is having people say what he needs them to say – rather than grounding their conversations in a character-based or context-based reality.  (Or even thoroughgoing consistency:  Thorbjørn talks about what tends to happen in recounting a dream soon after telling Jan that he rarely remembers his dreams.)  This – in combination with a dominance of words that’s abnormal in cinema (or, at least, in a film written directly for the screen) – gives the proceedings an essential unrealism.  Perhaps that also paves the way for Sex’s occasional bursts of surrealism and digression.

Each one of these has impact, not least because Haugerud has eschewed more obvious devices, like trying to recreate Thorbjørn’s Bowie dream on the screen or showing Jan’s queer encounter in flashback.  As a result, the story of the architects (Vetle Bergan and Iver Innset), recounted in a black-and-white sequence accompanied by the doctor’s voiceover, is all the more aberrant and stranger.  The mother who almost instructs Thorbjørn and Klaus to move her fridge is different to the extent that Klaus’s resulting hand injury impinges on the subsequent plot but this woman seems another example of coming-out-of-nowhere syndrome, and her lack of gratitude for the help she’s given is inexplicable (like something you might dream).  Haugerud fully prepares the ground for the concert that comprises Sex’s climactic sequence, yet this still comes as an engaging surprise.  Birgitte is there to watch her husband and son; Jan, Siri and their children are also in the audience.  Thorbjørn wears a vaguely ridiculous, not quite unisex outfit, a scarlet smock and shorts, run up by Klaus under his mother’s supervision.  Thorbjørn’s short solo introduces a more extended vocal performance by his choir that’s also choreographed.  Song and sort-of dance is such a departure from what’s gone before that this finale also verges on the surreal.

The film’s opening words are what Thorbjørn recalls the Bowie figure telling him, along the lines that most human beings are capable of goodness and should act accordingly.  The film’s closing words, sung by the choir, have a more distinctly Christian flavour.  Thorbjørn and Birgitte’s Christian belief – singing in the choir isn’t his only reason for going to church – emerges as a significant if opaque element of Sex.  Birgitte comes home with a dreamcatcher, a gift from a work colleague, which she hangs over her and Thorbjørn’s bed.  The Bowie dream, with minor variations, recurs and Thorbjørn takes the dreamcatcher down though it’s not as if he’s having bad dreams:  he wakes happy that a sympathetic, seemingly powerful presence saw him as a woman.  Even though Thorbjørn doesn’t feel any sexual appetite as such in the Bowie encounters, he seems to take a risk, in view of Jan and Siri’s experience, when he talks to Birgitte in detail about the dreams.  She registers surprise, tinged with momentary disquiet, but quickly absorbs what she’s told and infers spiritual meaning from her husband’s ‘feminine’ experience:  God and the love of God, she says, transcend sex and gender.

More amusingly, in their last tête-à-tête, Jan suggests to Thorbjørn that it was probably harder for him to tell Jan he was a practising Christian than it was for Jan to tell Thorbjørn about the homosexual happening.  This remark anticipates critical reaction to Sex, in the liberal press, at least.  Reviews typically commend the film’s exploration of how two ostensibly straight, monogamous men find themselves in terra incognita in terms of sexual experience and gender identity.  The reviewers concerned are less comfortable – almost tongue-tied – about the story’s religious aspect.  Haugerud signals his central theme in the film’s title.  His choice of a pioneer of gender fluidity as a key figure in the story is a further declaration of intent.  But Jan and Siri’s probing conversations about the relationship of sex and love in marriage and sexual intercourse, make clear the piece’s complexity.  Thorbjørn’s confusing Bowie with God (or vice versa) is part of Sex‘s pattern, too.

Through Klaus, Haugerud suggests a younger generation relatively untroubled by sexual convention and uninhibited in talking publicly about traditionally private things.  Early on, Klaus suggests to Thorbjørn that, because his high-school grades aren’t great, he’s thinking of starting up his own YouTube channel – like a girl he knows who’s become an influencer, making online videos about her make-up choices and menstrual cramps.  Klaus is in the room, working on the sewing machine, when his parents discuss the Bowie dreams; he bats an eyelid, but only just, when his father goes on to tell his mother about the work colleague who’s had sex with another man yet isn’t gay.

What’s the point of Jan and Thorbjørn’s being chimney sweeps?  For a time, you think it’s no more than that the occupation’s visual possibilities provide occasional breaks in a dialogue-heavy narrative.  But the men’s line of work starts to resonate in other ways.  Jan has suddenly found his life spinning out of control:  reeling from the impact of Siri’s anger and dismay, he has a dizzy spell during a rooftop job and phones Thorbjørn for help.  This idea might sound obvious, but it doesn’t play out as such.  Later in the same day, Jan sits disconsolately on a bench in the city centre.  A wedding party emerges from the building behind him; the new bride and groom want their picture taken with Jan (a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be).  Gamely, he agrees and smiles for the photo.

This isn’t the only instance of Haugerud’s harmonising what might seem artificial or disparate features of Sex.  Whereas its description of Jan and Siri’s mutual loss of trust and security in their marriage feels painfully real, Thorbjørn’s opening account of his dream is funny and the following tale of his identity crisis persistently amusing – not written or played for comedy explicitly but still a light-hearted matter beside the marital crisis.  This is partly because Thorbjørn’s predicament is repeatedly illustrated in symbolic terms.  The Bowie dreams are clearly the prime example, but the vocal changes signify, too, and so does the skin condition.  (Although the doctor diagnoses this as nothing more serious than peeling dry skin, that suggests of course the shedding of an old skin.)  For much of the film, the men’s stories are told in parallel:  most of Jan’s screen time is with Siri; as already noted, Thorbjørn talks with several other characters.  Yet Haugerud maintains just enough contact between the principals to sustain a link until he eventually reveals how their surprising experiences have something in common beyond calling established identities into question.  As Thorbjørn explains to Birgitte, Jan told him sex with another man was pleasurable not only because it was a novelty but also because the man saw Jan (or so it seemed to Jan) as no one else had ever seen him before.  Thorbjørn enjoys David Bowie’s attentions for the same reason.

Haugerud’s most remarkable achievement is in making Jan’s initial view of his brief sexual diversion credible, and his subsequent horror that his wife can’t see it that way, commiserable.  His seeming nonchalance when he first tells Thorbjørn about the incident seems astonishing – ditto Jan’s naïve confidence that Siri will almost laugh it off:  as she points out, a promise that he won’t do the same thing again isn’t much reassurance if he wants to do it again.  It rings true, though, when Jan tells his wife (and later Thorbjørn) that he believes telling her what happened makes all the difference – that it’s not telling her that would have been cheating on Siri.  Haugerud brings this off through his own fine writing and through Jan Gunnar Røise’s marvellous acting.  I’d not seen Røise on a cinema screen before:  he’s so distinctive and memorable in Sex that it seems hard to credit that I may have seen him in TV Scandi-noir parts and not noticed.  Although he and Thorbjørn Harr are about the same height (5’ 11”-ish), Røise seems shorter because he’s slighter.  As Jan, his almost comical face imparts at first a mixture of impishness and innocence, later an extraordinary fragility.  It’s easy to believe Siri when she tells her husband how vulnerable he has always looked when they make love.

Siri Forberg partners Røise beautifully.  More physically substantial than him, Forberg seems to use her weight to express the depth of Siri’s misery.  By the time they attend the school concert, Jan and Siri appear to have survived the crisis, though uncertainly.  As Jan watches the performance, his face suggests love of some kind for his friend on the stage.  The film’s closing sequence shows Jan and Siri leaving the concert with their sons.  Haugerud finally doesn’t use words to convey that things within this family have changed.  Røise, Forberg (who had a minor role in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021)) and Thorbjørn Harr all appeared in Barn (2019), Haugerud’s best-known film until the Oslo stories trilogy.  He says that he wrote the two main characters for Røise and Harr.  The latter is the only one of the main actors that I certainly recognised:  his many roles include the main character’s father in Paul Greengrass’s 22 July (2018) and the main character’s husband in Afterglow (2022), an erratic Norwegian TV drama in which Harr was the one consistently good thing.   As hinted above, his character in Sex doesn’t allow for the range and depth that Jan Gunnar Røise brings to his role but Thorbjørn Harr, from start to finish, is admirably deft and emotionally acute.

I hope I’ve got across how eccentrically funny Sex often is:  in the two main performances; in details like Anni-Frid keeping company with God and Bowie, the voice coach’s tongue-stretching-plus-Hannah Arendt therapy, the unfortunate choice of font for the architect’s tattoo.  The film also benefits from an exceptionally effective original score, by Peder Capjon Kjellsby – sometimes jazzy, sometimes brassy, always emotionally alive.  I’ve not been quite fair in stressing the primacy of words in Sex.  DP Cecilie Semec’s lighting of the city in what must be Oslo summertime supplies a gently powerful contrast with the darker, murkier elements of Haugerud’s story.  Repeated shots of building work in the city reinforce a sense of the changing landscape of three or four of its citizens’ lives.

Seeing Sex was a very happy accident.  I’d recently seen trailers for Haugerud’s Oslo stories at BFI but felt I should see all three films (albeit each of Sex, Dreams and Love is supposedly self-contained), which seemed too much just a few weeks ahead of this year’s London Film Festival.  On a flying visit to Edinburgh (less than forty-eight hours there), I intended to spend some time at the seaside, in North Berwick.  It rained throughout the day in question, so I looked to see what was showing at the resurrected Edinburgh Filmhouse.   Not much I was interested in, even less at a time that worked.  Because Sex is the first part of Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy, I thought I’d give it a go.  I ended up seeing a film that impressed me more than any other new film of the last year or so.

3 September 2025