Film review

  • Elsinore

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Simon Stone (2026)

    Simon Stone’s Elsinore, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, tells the story of Ian Charleson’s final performance, as Hamlet, at the National Theatre in late 1989 – a few weeks before his death from AIDS, at the age of forty.  For those who, like me, greatly enjoyed watching him on stage and screen, just seeing or hearing the name Ian Charleson prompts feelings of sadness and regret, which guarantees Elsinore a persistent emotional heft, though this also makes you more aware that Simon Stone is pushing too hard to reduce the audience to tears, especially in the closing stages.  I rather resented being told what to feel, having felt it from the start without the director’s help, but I liked the film a lot.  Andrew Scott is outstanding in the lead.  In the supporting cast, Olivia Colman and others do fine work.  Stephen Beresford’s curate’s egg of a screenplay is very good in parts.  Stone, who made The Daughter (2015) and The Dig (2021), develops a late-1980s context that’s often persuasive.  All in all, Elsinore does justice to an actor so worth commemorating.

    By the late 1970s, Charleson, who was born and grew up in Edinburgh, was building a solid career in British theatre and television.  (I first saw him on stage as Peregrine in the National Theatre’s Volpone, in August 1977.)  His cinema breakthrough came in Chariots of Fire (1981), where he played ‘Flying Scotsman’ Eric Liddell, though this didn’t lead to other major film roles.  Charleson was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986; early scenes in Elsinore describe his regular bathroom routine of checking his body for signs of something worse – what fellow AIDS sufferer Derek Jarman, who gave Charleson his first cinema role in Jubilee (1978), will facetiously describe as ‘polka dots’.  The first person to spot one of them on Charleson isn’t the actor himself but a woman making him up before he goes on a film set.  She doesn’t realise the significance of the mark on one of his temples (‘It’s only tiny’), but Charleson, once he looks closely in the mirror, instantly recognises the small purplish mark for what it is.  There’s no need for him to speak:  the panic in Andrew Scott’s eyes is piercing.

    Most of Stone and Beresford’s scene-setting is effective.  Charleson in a gay bar in Soho, joking with friends.  Gay men dressed as nuns dispensing condoms on the street or in popular cruising places, to other gay men.  (These sui generis community workers belong to the order of the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’; their religious names include Sister Belladonna, Sister Frigidity of the Nocturnal Emission, and so on.)  Once Charleson is seriously ill, Elsinore illustrates the physical ravages of AIDS more starkly than mainstream cinema’s usual combination of haggard pallor plus Kaposi’s sarcoma patches, although Andrew Scott’s face is never swollen, as Ian Charleson’s was, through septicaemia, by the time he delivered his twenty-four performances as Hamlet at the National.   His doctor, Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman), who runs an AIDS clinic at the Royal Free Hospital, urges him in vain not to take on the demanding role, convinced that doing so is bound to worsen his fragile condition.  Shortly before he’s due to give his first performance, he collapses and is rushed to hospital with pneumonia.  There seems no way that Charleson can rejoin the production, but he does.  Elsinore is one of the most gripping show-must-go-on stories – not least because you know this truly is a true story – that you’re likely to see on a cinema screen.

    The film’s strengths and weaknesses are sometimes very closely connected.  Charleson has three meetings with Derek Jarman (David Dawson).  The first is on a Soho street, where Jarman accuses Charleson of selling out, after ‘one queer role’ (in Jubilee), by cultivating the image of a ‘nice straight boy’ for the sake of a mainstream cinema career.  The last meeting is in Jarman’s famous garden in Dungeness, where the pair reconcile.  The intervening scene, when Charleson bumps into Jarman on the South Bank, is the most striking, for negative and positive reasons.  Jarman picks up where he left off in Soho, telling Charleson it’s his duty to go public about his AIDS diagnosis, to help other gay men, described by Jarman as ‘victims of the system’.  David Dawson, one of the cast’s weaker links, expresses Jarman’s intensity of feeling merely by shouting, so that any passer-by could hear (and if that was Jarman’s intention, Dawson needed to make it clearer).  Yet the response to this bad moment is both well written and powerfully delivered by Andrew Scott.  Charleson, who wasn’t from a socially privileged background, detects in Jarman’s dogmatic instructions the entitlement of the privately educated, which Charleson angrily (but much less noisily) deplores.  Clearly thinking back to Jarman’s derisive remarks on their previous meeting, he then insists he must continue to be credible in whatever role he’s playing – and won’t be fobbed off with pretty-good-considering-he’s-got-AIDS praise for his acting.  That speech is such a good moment in Elsinore that it made this viewer want to cheer.

    Ian Charleson did, of course, request that the cause of his death be publicly announced, to draw attention to AIDS but, for as long as he was able to work, saw himself as actor rather than activist.  What he says to Derek Jerman outside the National, in effect, puts Simon Stone’s film in historical context since plenty of actors nowadays – among those who win awards and give acceptance speeches, at any rate – evidently see themselves primarily as representing a cause (or causes).  But another difference between then and now in the acting identity politics department, almost certainly helps Elsinore.  While I don’t subscribe to the theory that gay characters should only be played by gay people (disabled characters by similarly disabled people, etc), Andrew Scott’s casting as this particular gay actor yields various benefits.  Although Scott is now a decade older than Charleson was when he died, he’s physically and vocally comfortable in the role.  Natural empathy may have helped ensure that he’s never striving to ennoble his character:  Charleson comes across as more admirable, and his plight is more moving, than might have been the case had the actor playing him strained for heroism.  And Scott has played Hamlet on the London stage, in Robert Icke’s 2017 production at the Almeida then the Harold Pinter Theatre.  (Although I go to the theatre less often now than in Ian Charleson’s heyday, I did see Scott’s Hamlet in the West End.)  Scott knows from personal experience the colossal workload entailed in learning the lines, let alone developing a characterisation – things that Charleson had to do in double-quick time.

    The film’s storytelling isn’t always clear, though.  The opportunity to play Hamlet in Richard Eyre’s production at the National arose because the original leading man, Daniel Day-Lewis, walked off during a performance and left the cast.  Elsinore doesn’t explain the notorious exit.  This may have seemed to Simon Stone the sensible option because Day-Lewis, over the years, has rather changed his mind about what happened.  At the time, he was supposedly shocked by seeing the ghost of his own late father during Hamlet’s encounter with his; in retrospect, Day-Lewis said that remark was a metaphor for how overwhelming an experience he found preparing for and playing Hamlet.  As a result, though, Elsinore rather gives the impression that the walk-off was a fit of diva-ish behaviour, which seems unfair.  (Whatever happened that night, Daniel Day-Lewis has never since performed in theatre.)  It’s also unclear what’s happening to the production when Charleson is laid up in hospital.  In fact, both Day-Lewis’s exit and Charleson’s pneumonia gave another fine actor, Jeremy Northam, his big chance:  Northam was Laertes in the production but temporarily promoted to Hamlet both times.  (When Charleson rejoins the cast, Northam reverts to playing Laertes.  He’s incarnated by Jamie Bogyo for the climactic sword fight with Hamlet.)

    A bigger issue is how Elsinore presents Charleson’s career trajectory and stage-versus-screen ambitions.  At one point, he says explicitly that he wanted to do films rather than plays, and the first half of Elsinore implies that by 1989 his acting career was going nowhere:  Chariots of Fire was eight years ago, and he can’t get another decent cinema role.  Early on, Charleson’s friend Sean (Matthew Beard) assures him, ludicrously, that Chariots of Fire was ‘one of the most celebrated films of all time’; otherwise, the script works up a running joke that all that’s remembered of Chariots is the music (the script doesn’t mention that that was probably thanks largely to the BBC’s using the Vangelis theme for all their Summer Olympics programmes in 1984 and 1988).  The Charleson of Elsinore is reduced to auditioning for a rubbishy action movie and watching himself on a breakfast TV interview, explaining his recent role in a Dario Argento giallo, which is meant to sound ridiculous.

    You wouldn’t guess from the film that Charleson was appearing in decent TV movies and drama or, more important to the story, in high-profile theatre well into the late 1980s.  These omissions may be deliberate – to make more salient that coming out as gay and maintaining a big-time movie career were incompatible then – yet they don’t make sense within the film’s overall scheme.  When Charleson is measured for his Hamlet costume at the National, the wardrobe person (Michele Austin) says the tailored suit he wore as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls should still fit (though why would he wear it in a production of Hamlet that wasn’t remotely modern dress?)  This sequence is included mainly to get over that Charleson has lost weight recently – but also has the effect of suggesting that he hadn’t worked at the National since Guys and Dolls.  That was in 1982.  In fact, he’d played opposite Julie Walters in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at the Cottesloe in 1984-85; as recently as 1988, he was Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyttelton.  (I saw the former on its transfer to the West End, the latter at the National.)  On the evidence of Elsinore, it’s hard to understand why Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) is so keen for Charleson to replace Daniel Day-Lewis.  Once that happens, though, Stone and Beresford change tack, giving the impression that a second crack at Hamlet (he’d first played the role in his mid-twenties, in a touring production for the Cambridge Theatre Company) has long been the summit of Charleson’s ambition.

    There’s no doubt that this abrupt U-turn moves the film to dramatically more fruitful ground.  The resonances between Charleson’s plight and Shakespeare’s morbid lines and scenes don’t need to be, and aren’t, overstressed:  Andrew Scott’s taste and integrity guarantee that even the most obvious convergence of life and art – Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull – is, as well as compelling, rendered natural.  Addressing the cast at the start of rehearsals, Richard Eyre describes Hamlet as ‘a play about being alive and becoming dead’.  Elsinore’s most impressive achievement comes in showing Ian Charleson’s immersion in the character of deathbound Hamlet as an impassioned assertion of his acting gifts – and as self-assertion, that he’s alive, though not for much longer.  The film isn’t as grim as this makes it sound because Stephen Beresford (whose only previous solo screenplay was Pride (2014)) is quite generous with the graveyard humour.  ‘If you’re going to play this part,’ Margaret Johnson tells Charleson, once she realises he won’t be dissuaded from doing so, ‘there’s to be no more talk of death’.  ‘That might be tricky – it’s one of the play’s central themes’, he replies.

    That exchange features in the Elsinore trailer; Johnson’s rejoinder to Charleson doesn’t, though it’s another decent line – to the effect that she doesn’t need educating in what Hamlet’s about. Later, on finding him, when he’s meant to be resting, running lines with one of the ward staff (Ronke Adekoluejo), who’s reading Ophelia, she dispatches the nurse with ‘Get thee to bedpans and blood tests’.  The film’s Margaret Johnson is an irresistible blend – almost comically no-nonsense yet thoroughly compassionate.  Olivia Colman, emotionally precise and funny, does her best work in cinema since Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021).  Colman’s nuanced playing enhances moments that would otherwise just be OTT.  Nicholas (Joe Locke), a very young patient with an AIDS death sentence, has dreams of a career in musical theatre that won’t come true.  Charleson discovers in the ward’s supply of audiocassettes an Ethel Merman album and arranges a line-up of patients – including himself but with Nicholas at the centre – who lip-sync ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, complete with camp dance moves.  The sequence is saved by Colman’s face, as she watches the routine, unseen by the participants in it.  Margaret Johnson is eventually in the Olivier Theatre audience for Charleson’s Hamlet:  here too, Olivia Colman makes the doctor’s mixed feelings silently and eloquently clear.

    Simon Stone has assembled a high-powered cast.  At and near the start, I wondered if this would result in numerous talented people making the most – too much – of a probably brief appearance.  In the event, that’s rarely a problem:  most of these contributions aren’t as fleeting as I’d assumed they would be.  The highlights are usually characters based on real people who aren’t well known.  That category includes, as well as Margaret Johnson, Linda Tolhurst, the National Theatre’s very long-serving stage door supervisor; she’s played by brilliant Monica Dolan, whose every look and line are perfectly weighted.  Paul Chahidi also registers strongly, in the smaller role of Ralph, the dresser who first tells Charleson about the Johnson clinic.  As Patsy Pollock, the casting director and friend who nursed Charleson at the end of his life, Billie Piper has more screen time than most, though it doesn’t add up to much.

    In the Hamlet cast, more famous names are played by familiar faces – Juliet Stevenson is Sylvia Syms as Gertrude (a role Stevenson also played to Andrew Scott’s Hamlet in 2017), Danny Webb is Michael Bryant as Polonius, David Rintoul is John Castle as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.  (Alyth Ross, not a familiar face to me, is Stella Gonet as Ophelia.)   At the top of the NT tree is Richard Eyre, the National’s artistic director at the time and the only person there in whom Charleson immediately confides about his illness, which doesn’t stop Eyre from giving him the big role.  Although the part of Eyre is shakily written, especially his opening address to the cast about Hamlet, Johnny Flynn does a good job with it.  Invented characters like Nicholas and Georgie (Luke Thompson), Charleson’s dying ex-lover, feel like composites.  So does Sean, even though he isn’t (I guessed this was the playwright and director Sean Mathias) and Matthew Beard is always worth watching.  Ditto Adeel Akhtar, though who knows why such a quality actor was needed for a thirty-second appearance as a man from whom Charleson buys a motor bike.

    Montage overload just about wrecks the film’s closing scenes, as Simon Stone moves back and forth repeatedly between the Olivier stage and Ian Charleson’s deathbed.  Stefan Gregory’s overwrought, overused score, a problem throughout, makes matters worse.  In an early scene, Charleson explains to Patsy Pollock’s daughter (Sadie Soverall) an established ritual at the National Theatre, where the dressing rooms, arranged around a central interior space, have windows facing directly onto each other.  When an actor is called to the stage, other actors gather at and hammer on these windows in a show of support.  Elsinore seems to end about twenty times, and this ritual is one of the non-endings.  Although Stone makes it compete with Stefan Gregory’s music, the window-hammering is still a powerful sound and would have been, for more than one reason, a fitting finale.

    When Charleson is laid low with pneumonia, his parents (Georgie Glen and (Peter Mullan) come down from Scotland to visit their son in hospital.  There’s a bit of uneasy conversation before the camera moves outside the room, to the other side of a glass partition:  we see but don’t hear him tell his mother and father, for the first time, that he’s gay, and that he has AIDS.  The stunned parents take their leave and stand outside in the hospital car park.  The episode seems to be going on for too long, yet when Peter Mullan breaks down in tears in the car park, it’s very affecting.  This moment epitomises the film.  Simon Stone is determined to squeeze every drop from the tragedy of Ian Charleson and, in Elsinore‘s climax, so relentlessly exploits Andrew Scott’s talents that he risks killing the goose that lays the film’s golden eggs.  That doesn’t happen because Scott keeps finding more – as, in their smaller roles, do Olivia Colman, Monica Dolan, Peter Mullan and others.  For all its faults, Elsinore successfully pays tribute to a wonderful and singular actor.  Almost because of some of those faults, the film also salutes the resource of actors, plural.

    9 October 2026

     

     

     

  • Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kjærlighet

    Dag Johan Haugerud (2024)

    The Norwegian capital provides vibrant context in Love, as it does in the other parts of Dag Johan Haugerud’s ‘Oslo stories’ trilogy, but more variously this time.  Oslo is, as well as the backdrop to the main characters’ working lives, seen from the vantage point of the Nesodden peninsula or the commuter ferry that runs between Nesodden and Oslo, the city’s buildings moving across the screen at the ferry’s pace.  On New Year’s Day 2025, Oslo officially marked its centenary – to be precise, the centenary of reverting to its old Norse name, after centuries with the Danish name of Christiania (later Kristiania) – and this anniversary also plays a key part in the film.  Early on, Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who works in the municipal culture department, conducts a small group on a tour of the exterior of Oslo’s city hall.  Her companions are the team working on a project planned and led by Heidi as part of the centenary celebrations.  She draws attention to figures carved into the stone friezes of the 1920s exterior, reinterpreting these 2020s-style to justify her project’s inclusive slant.  A woman holding a baby honours single motherhood.  Two women with a baby are an endorsement of same-sex parenting.  A group of two men and a woman predicts a sexual threesome.  Heidi is troubled, and a bit irritated, by her colleagues’ politely sceptical reactions.

    Her lecture isn’t the very start of Love, though, and the audience has already met one of the people listening to it.  Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is not part of the project team but a longstanding friend of Heidi; she’s a hospital doctor – a urologist.  In the film’s opening sequence, her voice is explaining to a man, whose appalled face dominates the frame, the treatment options for the prostate cancer he’s been diagnosed with, and the likely consequences of treatments.  Another man – a nurse – is in the background to the shot.  He doesn’t speak, as Marianne sets things out as helpfully as she can.  She asks if the patient has any questions.  He doesn’t, beyond one already asked:  will he need to ask for time off work?  (As the top he’s wearing makes clear, he’s a food delivery driver.)  As soon as the consultation is over, the nurse, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), suggests to Marianne that the man was too shocked to take in most of what she was saying.  She’s not convinced but, moments later, Tor sees the abject patient in the waiting area with an older woman, presumably his mother, who insists that he must be told more.  Tor calls Marianne, and she asks the man and his mother to come back to the consulting room.  What happens in this opening episode foreshadows a pattern in Love.  Conversations with Tor will lead Marianne to second or even third thoughts.  Tor will continue to act on his feelings about what vulnerable patients need.

    Marianne tags on to the city hall tour because she’ll shortly accompany Heidi to Nesodden and the home of Heidi’s neighbour, Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad).  He’s a geologist whose expertise in Oslo’s rock formations is somehow to be worked into the centenary project, along with contributions from the architect, composer and choreographer that Heidi also plans to involve and who’ll all be at the evening’s gathering, hosted by Ole Harald.  Marianne is invited along because Heidi, who’s married, sees Ole Harald as a prospective romantic partner for her unattached friend (never mind that Marianne’s not looking to be attached:  Heidi thinks she should be).  Ole Harald is divorced from Solveig (Marian Saastad Ottesen), but she and the couple’s little daughters live virtually next door, and they’re at his place when Heidi and Marianne arrive.  On the ferry across to Nesodden, Marianne bumps into Tor, who explains he’s staying in a cabin on the peninsula for the summer.  As Ole Harald talks, with a nice wry humour, about the make-up of the Oslo ‘cauldron’, the camera’s attention seems to wander (like the attention of some of Ole Harald’s guests).  It moves out into the waters of the Oslofjord, and a lone male swimmer there – Tor.  We then briefly see him in his cabin, getting ready to go out.  When Marianne takes the ferry back to Oslo, Tor is again a fellow passenger and they chat more revealingly.

    Like Marianne, Tor isn’t in a settled relationship; unlike her, he has plenty of different sexual partners.  He tells her he sometimes spends evenings going back and forth on the ferry, looking out for men:  he uses Grindr to find possible candidates on board.  To have sex, Marianne asks?  Sometimes, says Tor, more often just to talk, occasionally both.  He explains that, as in some cruising spots on dry land, being with a stranger on ‘neutral ground’ creates a pleasant closeness that makes it natural to open up conversationally.   After Marianne gets off in Oslo, Tor stays on the ferry, takes out his phone and brings up the photograph of another man (Lars Jacob Holm) who has just boarded and is sitting nearby.  When the man moves into another seating area, Tor follows and starts to talk to him.

    The man, whose name is Bjørn, is rather surprised but talks affably with Tor, while making clear that he’s not looking for sex.  In fact, from what he tells Tor, it’s a while since Bjørn has had any kind of sexual relationship (he uses Grindr ‘just to look’); and what he asks Tor about his sex life has the effect of stressing what’s already physically apparent – that Bjørn and Tor belong to different generations.  (There’s an age gap of nearly twenty years between the two actors concerned.)  Bjørn explains that he’s coming home from work so late because he had to see a patient:  he’s a psychologist who sometimes feels, he says, like telling his clients just to pull themselves together.  Although Tor shows no sign of recognising Bjørn, it’s a different matter for the film‘s audience.  In Love‘s opening episode, Bjørn was himself a patient, called in to see a different doctor in the hospital urology team.  After the ferry conversation between Tor and Bjørn, Haugerud returns to Marianne’s consulting room – now with another, very young male facing the camera and on the receiving end of alarming health news.  Marianne’s voice is telling the patient the prognosis for his prostate cancer is good.  Tor again stands quietly in the background until he’s impelled by the young man’s distress to approach and touch him reassuringly.

    Describing the first forty minutes or so of Love in such detail, I’m probably making the film sound unremarkable.  I could instead have immediately distilled Haugerud’s gradually emerging themes yet doing that would have felt wrong.  It’s a hallmark of this filmmaker – and of this part of his trilogy especially – that he uses seemingly everyday interactions as the means to create screen characters and drama that are not just absorbing but exhilarating:  part of the exhilaration comes from simply watching and listening to individuals’ conversations and reactions to what they’re seeing in, and hearing from, one another – and wondering that Haugerud and his actors make the exchanges as compelling as they do.  There’s usually more to those exchanges than meets the ear, of course, and Haugerud, through that ferry chat between Marianne and Tor, starts to develop what will be Love‘s central dialectic – marital commitment vs casual sex, and their pros and cons.

    Despite her mild resistance to Heidi’s matchmaking, Marianne, who looks to be her late forties, instantly takes to Ole Harald, as does he to her.  She surprises herself during that first visit when she momentarily gropes his backside.  Ole Harald doesn’t mind at all.  He tells Marianne he’d like to see her again.  Next time she goes to his house alone.   He invites her to stay the night; she acknowledges that she would like to, but says no.  The doubts she already had about a committed relationship have been doubly reinforced.  First, by the very present evidence of Ole Harald’s continuing contact with anxious, drink-dependent Solveig, and especially with their two children (the ex-couple share childcare).  Second, by what Tor told Marianne on the ferry.  When she heads home after her second visit to Ole Harald, she uses Tinder as Tor uses Grindr and starts talking with another passenger (Morten Svartveit).

    Back in Oslo, Marianne and this man go for an impromptu swim by the docks and have sex, which both enjoy.  For Marianne, the freedom she feels in this intimacy with a stranger – we never know his name, only that he’s a carpenter by trade – is just as Tor suggested.  Once she and the carpenter have dressed and resume chatting, the dynamic changes.  When Marianne tells him she’s never previously had sex so spontaneously, the carpenter says he often hooks up with strangers.  He adds that his wife’s away at present, so he has more time to himself.  Marianne supposed he was as unattached as Tor is; the carpenter insists he loves his wife – they’ve been married twenty years – but he takes the view that marriage lowers expectations and can’t fully satisfy his sexual needs.  He gets worked up as he acknowledges that he feels guilty deceiving his wife in this way.  Before they part company, he tells Marianne that ‘I think you ruined this a little’.

    Haugerud’s Oslo stories repeatedly suggest that sexual behaviour and sexual identity needn’t be the same thing and show how perceptions of them differ.  In Sex, one of the male protagonists, for the first time in his life, has sex with another man; this doesn’t change his view of himself as straight, but certainly does change his wife’s view of their relationship.  In Dreams, the teenage female protagonist is infatuated with a teacher, also female, but angry when her mother, not unsympathetically, labels this a ‘queer awakening’.  (At the end of these films, it’s implied that the Sex man’s marriage and family life survive and that the Dreams girl, although she has dated a boy, eventually realises that she prefers women.)  A succession of moments in Love resonates with this strand of Sex and Dreams.  Almost comically, in Heidi’s reading of the friezes on the Oslo city hall.  When Tor tells Marianne about the men he talks or has sex with, some of whom don’t see themselves as gay or bisexual.  In the carpenter’s annoyance with Marianne’s questions about his marriage.  Yet in contrast to Sex and Dreams, there’s no sexual ambivalence on the part of Love’s principals.  It seems that Marianne, Ole Harald, Heidi and the carpenter are unequivocally straight, and Tor and Bjørn unequivocally gay.  In the latter case, this leads to an eventually expansive illustration of what it can mean, or has meant in recent decades, to be a gay man.

    The film’s timeframe is less than a month; Haugerud divides the narrative into virtual chapters by indicating specific dates in August on the screen.  Within a couple of days of his first appearance in the hospital corridor, Bjørn is back there.  This time, Tor, after seeing him leave the building, follows on his bicycle.  Bjørn is on foot and, when Tor catches him up, seems to be having some kind of panic attack, but doesn’t want help or even to talk.  After Tor has ridden away and he’s alone, Bjørn sobs.  He’s next seen in hospital again, after surgery to remove his prostate, and Tor looks in on him.  Before that happens, Tor asks Marianne if it’s OK for him to check how Bjørn is, acknowledging that they first met on the ferry.  Marianne is dubious.  She gives the go-ahead, but only ‘as a nurse on duty, not as you’ (adding that ‘If this was some girl you’d met on Tinder, I’d say no in a heartbeat – now that I’m not, it’s confusing me’).  When Haugerud then cuts to Tor, changed out of his hospital uniform into civvies to visit Bjørn, it seems he’s flagrantly ignoring what Marianne advised.  What follows between the two men, though, reveals on Tor’s part a subtle blend of compassion.

    Although Bjørn says he has friends who’ll help when he’s first discharged from hospital, he cautiously accepts Tor’s offer to shop for him.  While Tor is in his apartment, Bjørn has problems with his catheter and, although embarrassed, lets Tor clean up the bathroom.  Bjørn is soon also ready to talk about his past, and how he sees it.  He tells Tor that, on the very day he was having the prostatectomy, he heard a news report on progress in developing an HIV vaccine.  This reminded Bjørn of another coincidence, nearly forty years ago:  he came out in 1986, just before media coverage of AIDS as a gay disease took off.  Bjørn felt this was punishment for his homosexuality.  He continued to have sex, sometimes unprotected, but underwent regular HIV checks.  The cycle of shame and anxiety eventually got so bad that he became celibate.  He tells Tor that he now seems to have come full circle:  just when there’s the prospect of a vaccine, Bjørn is getting his prostate removed.

    Doctors in the team that Marianne belongs to, routinely warn patients in Bjørn’s situation that surgery is liable to result in erectile dysfunction and sterility.  At one point, Tor suggests that Marianne should also mention the effects of prostate removal on anal sex (he says he finds pressure on the prostate very pleasurable); Marianne, unaware of this, welcomes the suggestion.  Tor admits to her that, as a gay man, he may feel more compassion for other gay male patients.  This chimes with something else he said to Marianne on the ferry, when he mentioned gay partners who told him they were rejected by their families because of their sexuality – a rejection Tor calls ‘evil’ (a word seldom if ever heard in the Oslo stories trilogy).  Yet Tor’s empathy doesn’t prevent his dismay at Bjørn’s pessimism and isolation.  When Tor reminds him that effective combination therapy has been available for years, Bjørn’s reply is that it’s nevertheless depressing to be on lifelong medication.  One night, after seeing that Bjørn is comfortably in bed, Tor announces that he’s going to share it.  He’ll lie down next to Bjørn, ‘not out of pity but because I want to’.  He doesn’t say this will help Bjørn, though he clearly thinks it will.  Tor assures Bjørn he won’t ‘do anything’ in bed, but he does gently put his hand in Bjørn’s, and Bjørn seems to relax.

    Fears of illness and death are another persisting theme in Love.  These are expressed most plainly by the patients in Marianne’s clinic but non-patients, knowing she’s a doctor, may also ask her advice.  On Marianne’s first visit to Ole Harald’s place, Solveig tearfully explains that her mother and grandmother both had cancer and wants to know from Marianne if her persistent insomnia indicates that Solveig will, too – she read somewhere that sleeping badly is often a bad sign.  After warning Tor not to confuse professional and personal relations, Marianne seeks his advice about crossing the line between uncommitted and committed relationships.  Should she accept Ole Harald’s invitation to dinner?  After all, she doesn’t want to send the wrong signals.  Sympathetic though amused, Tor thinks a yes to dinner could well confuse the issue but that’s not enough to dissuade Marianne, and this time she ends up sleeping with Ole Harald.  As they talk in bed, though, she makes clear she doesn’t want a long-term relationship.  Ole Harald humorously promises never to ask to marry her but does ask if he has permission to tell her he loves her.  Marianne says, with her characteristic sad smile, that she’ll allow him that.

    On an earlier visit to Ole Harald, Marianne quoted an extract from the diaries of Dutch-Jewish writer Etty Hillesum:  ‘I have an innate love for all humanity’.  Dag Johan Haugerud is a humanist filmmaker not least in the sense that he likes nearly all his characters or, at the very least, gives each one of them a fair hearing.  In Love, there are only three relatively unsympathetic people.  There’s an elderly couple – a prostate cancer patient and his wife – who are dissatisfied to be, as they see it, palmed off with Marianne and want to deal with a senior consultant instead (the same consultant who operated on Bjørn).  Once they’ve got their wish, Tor tells Marianne in no uncertain terms what he thinks of people like these two, but Marianne is more accepting:  she realises the man and his wife are worried, as anyone would be in their circumstances.  Less obviously, there’s Heidi – who is bossy yet defensive, who lays the law down to Marianne but repeatedly seeks reassurance from her.  She’s the only major character in Haugerud’s trilogy who might be dismissed as a pain in the neck – yet you don’t dismiss her as unworthy of attention.

    Haugerud’s generosity is hugely helped by his actors.  I can’t think of a single performance that’s a relatively weak link in any of Sex, Dreams or Love.  There are standouts, of course, and in Love, they are Andrea Bræin Hovig and Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen.  In the supporting cast, Thomas Gullestad, admirably nuanced and natural as Ole Harald, is particularly impressive, but it’s important to say more about another member of the cast, Lars Jacob Holm, because his character is unique in featuring throughout the trilogy.  I must confess I don’t remember Holm in Sex, where it seems Bjørn made only a fleeting appearance, but he certainly registered in Dreams, as the protagonist’s psychotherapist.  Although the therapist was unnamed in the Dreams cast list, once we know Bjørn’s line of work in Love it seems fair to assume he’s one and the same person.  The sequence of Bjørn’s appearances in Love almost corresponds to the development of his character across the trilogy:  only glimpsed in his first appearance in the hospital, he’s then introduced as a psychologist before becoming a big part of Haugerud’s story.  On the other hand, Bjørn is also a fascinating figure in relation to the almost chicken-and-egg matter of the order of films in the trilogy:  which came first, Dreams or Love?  Far from settling the question, Bjørn enriches it.  We might think the composed professional of Dreams precedes the vulnerable, unhappy Bjørn of Love.  Yet we can also speculate that, after he’d got through the prostate surgery and perhaps thanks to Tor’s therapeutic effect on him, Bjørn was able to return to work and talk with Dreams’ young heroine.

    We can’t know, one way or the other; nor do we know how the main relationships in Love will progress, if at all.  Leaving Ole Harald’s house one morning after spending the night there, Marianne is distressed to find his elder daughter waiting outside because she doesn’t want to be in her mother’s house but doesn’t think she should be with her father either, while he has someone else with him.  This seems to confirm to Marianne that she shouldn’t be a regular part of Ole Harald’s life.  Heading off for the ferry, she then bumps into Solveig, who clearly wants to talk.  Marianne soon realises that so does she; this time, she, rather than Solveig, is in tears, Marianne admitting how lost she feels.  (She and Bjørn are a kind of pair – both professionally obliged to listen, both thus concealing their own need to be heard.)  Solveig says it would be good to talk again, and Marianne says she’ll liaise with Heidi so that the three of them can meet in Oslo together.  She has also already told Solveig, when the latter said she didn’t want to get in the way of Ole Harald and Marianne’s relationship, that ‘you can put all that behind you’.  The same morning, after spending the night with Bjørn, Tor also gets ready to leave for Oslo.  Bjørn seems less wretched, though still anxious.  ‘You need to trust people more,’ Tor tells him, in affectionate exasperation, and kisses Bjørn before leaving.  What Andrea Bræin Hovig and Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen achieve over the course of Love makes for an extraordinary film-watching experience.  In the end, you feel not only that you know Marianne and Tor, but – in keeping with the film’s name – love for them.

    The last time we see them they’re in Heidi’s company, taking the ferry into Oslo for another working day.  Marianne and Tor disappear into the crowd of other passengers disembarking.  While you’re sorry to lose sight of them, you may reflect that any of those commuters might well have a tale worth telling.  In the world of Haugerud’s cinema, everyone is interesting by virtue of their individuality – in nearly all cases, by virtue of the quality of their conversation, too.  That may lead you to question how realistic a world this is but, if you’re anything like this viewer, it won’t bother you much since Haugerud and his actors make all the characters credible and engaging.

    Heidi’s centenary project is eventually scaled down to a modest, apolitical concert on the top of the city hall, with a woman vocalist and a small band, who play Love out.  (The pleasant, mellow score is by Peder Kjellsby, who also composed the music for Sex.)  Although the Dreams premiere came after the Love premiere, the order of words on the screen at the start of both films – arranged vertically – is Sex, Dreams and Love, and Love does feel like the trilogy’s culmination.  Cecilie Semec is again the cinematographer here, but the outdoor visuals seem more relaxed and capacious than in either Sex or Dreams.  As for the story, despite the difficult situations the characters are dealing with, Love is at last somehow joyful.  Haugerud may have been, as he has said, inspired by Kieślowski’s Three Colours but I think at least two of the Norwegian’s films surpass their inspiration.  Of the three Oslo stories, Dreams won the biggest prize – the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2025 – but it’s hard not to think this was really a reward for the trilogy as a whole, Sex having screened at the previous year’s Berlinale and Love at Venice in 2024.

    This time last year, I was wary of watching all three of the Oslo stories just ahead of the London Film Festival, anxious to avoid a backlog of reviews even before LFF got underway.  It’s that time of year again, I’ve watched Dreams and Love within the space of a fortnight – and spent too much of those two weeks trying to sort out my thoughts about Dreams.  Now I’m struggling to write about Love before my annual bout of daily filmgoing begins, but I’m not complaining.  If I see anything at this year’s LFF nearly as good as Love, I’ll be smiling.  That was something I did repeatedly as I watched Dag Johan Haugerud’s wonderful film.

    30 September 2026

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