Drømmer

Dag Johan Haugerud (2024)

All three parts of Dag Johan Haugerud’s ‘Oslo stories’ trilogy premiered in the same year – Sex at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2024, Love at the Venice Festival that September and Dreams in Norway just a few weeks later.  Dreams subsequently screened at the 2025 Berlinale, where Haugerud became the first Norwegian to win the Golden Bear[1].  Haugerud was originally commissioned by the Swedish streaming service Viaplay in 2022 to make this trio of films, the project also supported by the Norwegian Film Institute and others.  He has acknowledged Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1990s Three Colours trilogy as an inspiration for Sex, Love and Dreams.  Like Kieślowski’s Blue, White and Red, each of Haugerud’s Oslo stories is, technically at least, a standalone piece and the three films can be watched in any order.  Although Dreams is chronologically (just) the last of them, this viewer watched it (just) before Love.

Sex had a bigger impact – partly because Haugerud’s work was new to me when I saw it, partly because I think it’s more inventive and more satisfying than Dreams – though the latter is very well acted and writer-director Haugerud’s dialogue often impressive.  The dominance of words at first seems less salient than in Sex – not least because Dreams is visually more fluid (Haugerud’s cinematographer is again Cecilie Semec).  But the relationship between what the audience is seeing and what we’re hearing in Dreams becomes increasingly tricky.

Seventeen-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) lives with her single-parent mother, Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), but is emotionally more at home with her maternal grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who lives close by and whom she often sees.  Haugerud explores the relationships of these three characters with each other, and the shifts in them resulting from a fourth relationship that drives the whole narrative.  This centres on Johanne’s feelings for a teacher at her high school, a beautiful mixed-race woman (Selome Emnetu), perhaps in her late thirties, whose name is nearly identical to that of her teenage admirer.  Johanna has recently started work at the school as a temporary member of staff (she seems to be a supply teacher, or its Norwegian equivalent).  She teaches French but is primarily a textile designer, as suggested by the striking assortment of home-knitted outfits that she wears to work.  Johanne makes up her mind to learn to knit, as a means of getting – or feeling – closer to her teacher.  With Kristin less than keen to help, Johanne tells Johanna she wants to knit and Johanna offers to teach her.  Pretending to her mother that she’s spending extra time at the modern dance class she attends after school, Johanne instead makes regular trips to Johanna’s home in a central Oslo apartment building.

In keeping with Johanna’s background, textiles and textures are persistently important in Dreams’ visual scheme.  She’s supposedly renting the apartment from an absent friend, but its décor expresses the somewhat bohemian aesthetic that’s part of what attracts Johanne to her – textile art on the walls, more gorgeous knitwear on Johanna or in the wardrobe.  The knitting lessons focus on teacher and pupil, and Haugerud’s camera, appreciating the feel of the yarn and of Johanna’s finished creations.  On one occasion, she suggests to Johanne they both try on some of her clothes.  The sequence that follows has a light-hearted dressing-up-box aspect but also a sensual charge, at least from Johanne’s point of view – when they get changed, it’s a chance for her to see, literally, more of Johanna.  We already know that Johanne wonders at the softness of Johanna’s skin because her voiceover has told us so.  As Dreams develops, though, and the narrative structure becomes more complicated, we start to doubt that Johanne is as reliable a narrator as we’d first supposed.

At the start of Dreams and for some way into it, Johanne’s voiceover dominates, and she appears in every scene that her voice introduces or describes.  But then comes a scene of her mother and grandmother discussing her, from which Johanne herself is absent; her voiceover comments on a conversation she wasn’t in the room to hear.  By gradually moving away from a central consciousness who’s all-seeing and always involved in the film’s action, Haugerud leaves us uncertain how much of what we’re watching really happened, how much is what Johanne imagines may have happened, or wanted to happen.  The possibility of an unreliable narrator grows once we learn that Johanne has written a memoir of the short time in which she knew Johanna.  Any statement of who Johanne is, or of what she really does, soon becomes highly contingent.  (I won’t keep repeating ‘or so she says’ throughout this note but hope it’s clear wherever that qualification applies.)

We wonder if Johanne’s voiceover is reading from the memoir – sometimes, at least.  That could help to explain apparent contradictions in what characters say.  For example, in one of the Kristin-Karin dialogues, the older woman says she’s had many lovers in her life and is sorry only that there won’t be more to come; Karin, a published poet, subsequently tells her publisher (Andrine Saether) that she regrets having had rather few lovers.  Haugerud is surely too careful and acute a writer simply to have slipped up.  Is what Karin says, then, an instance of someone saying different things about the same thing just to suit the person she’s talking with, or for the effect she wants to have on them?   (That’s something most of us do.)  Or is Johanne the creative writer imagining the different possibilities in her grandmother’s life?  This is certainly what’s happening when Johanne’s voice introduces a dream that she imagines Karin dreaming.

A long stairway on a street near the main characters’ homes appears several times in Dreams.  Johanne is seen walking there more than once; it’s also where Karin talks with her publisher.  In the dream that Johanne gives to her grandmother, the stairway becomes even longer, seeming to stretch heavenwards:  golden light transforms it into a Jacob’s Ladder, ascended by Karin amid men of varying shapes, sizes and age, all wearing white.  As they head upwards, the company’s movement suggests modern dance, which obviously picks up Johanne’s own dance class but also echoes the strange dance routine in the finale to Sex.  There’s no doubt the Jacob’s Ladder sequence is remarkable, and more spectacular than the one in Sex, yet it’s somehow less engaging, too.

Johanne likes to think that Johanna, at least to some extent, reciprocates her feelings.  Some of the looks exchanged in the apartment, and affectionate embraces between the two when Johanne arrives or leaves (in combination with Cecilie Semec’s warm lighting), seem to give substance to her hopes that Johanna loves her back.  Other incidents make you very doubtful of this.  Johanne’s voiceover, recalling her penultimate visit to the apartment and how she and Johanna chatted easily ‘for ages’ then, is accompanied by a shot of the two of them sitting side by side, with Johanna talking – but we don’t hear what she’s saying, and we’ve not gained an idea, in what’s gone before, of what this pair could chat about easily, except knitting.  The apartment scenes are primarily visual.  The exception comes when Johanne visits, after a break of a few weeks, to find the look of the place and Johanna’s manner towards her much changed.  On this occasion, another woman arrives while Johanne is there.  This is Frøydis (Ingrid Giæver), closer in age to, though also a former student of, Johanna.  As soon as she arrives, Frøydis becomes the focus of Johanna’s attention and Johanne infers the two are in a relationship.  Her aggrieved voiceover makes clear how rejected she feels by the experience.  Johanna is so different in this episode – so suddenly – that an objective viewer can scarcely believe their ears or eyes.

In this kind of screen storytelling, a filmmaker can sometimes depend on an unreliable narrator to justify any ambiguity or implausibility, telling the audience, in effect:  you can’t blame me – I’m just giving you the narrator’s version of events.  (This is among the exasperating features of the new Almodóvar film, Bitter Christmas.)  I’m not sure how extensively Haugerud does this in Dreams, but aspects of the story are unsatisfying.  The longer the film went on, the more I wondered why he’d given Dreams a teacher-pupil basis in the first place.  A schoolteacher’s readiness to invite one of their students, not yet legally an adult, into their home, with no one else present, is on the face of it surprising nowadays (and Dreams seemingly is happening in the 2020s).  You’d expect Johanna at least to be sensitive to how her private meetings with Johanne away from school premises might be perceived by others if they knew – the school authorities included.  Perhaps Haugerud is using the fact that Johanna isn’t a career schoolteacher as a pretext for her heedlessness, but, if so, it’s quite a weak pretext.

The script is properly careful not to reduce Johanne’s obsession to a schoolgirl’s crush on a teacher:  there’s only one mention (according to the film’s English subtitles) of a ‘crush’, which is then instantly refuted in the conversation in which it occurs.  Yet the way that Johanne’s infatuation plays out at school doesn’t convince.  She says French is one of her best subjects, and Johanna notices her ability in the first lesson she takes with Johanne’s class.  After that, though, there’s no suggestion that Johanne is eager to get into Johanna’s good books by doing well in class.  It’s very believable when Johanne describes how, on days when she wasn’t being taught by Johanna, she got into the habit of trying to catch sight of her somewhere in the school – how doing so made the whole day worthwhile.  But Johanne’s reaction is much less persuasive when her voiceover explains that, on Johanna’s birthday, other kids in the class gave her as a present a colourful knitted scarf.  You’d expect Johanne to be aghast that she wasn’t aware it was Johanna’s birthday when some of her classmates were.  We also know, from Johanne’s earlier recollection of reading in childhood a book from her grandmother’s shelves, about her enchantment with a story whose heroine finds comfort and protection in a scarf, and how someone wrapped it round the heroine’s neck.  There’s a moment later in the film when, as Johanne is about to leave the apartment, Johanna arranges on her the lovely woollen scarf that Johanne habitually wears (a pattern of green, maroon and pink-fawn squares).  Yet there’s no mention of the enduring memory of the storybook scarf on Johanna’s birthday; instead, the other kids’ gift simply prompts Johanne’s determination to learn to knit.  More largely, there’s never a hint of what difference Johanne’s relationship with Johanna outside school makes to seeing her in the classroom.  Once the private visits are taking place, Johanne’s school life disappears from the film.

Most of the scenes involving Kristin and Karin, with or without Johanne, are excellent, along with Haugerud’s development of the trio’s relationships.  It’s never clear how Kristin earns a living, but in the early scenes she’s usually on a laptop and too busy to be bothered with her daughter.  In contrast, Karin is – for Johanne – an almost idealised maternal figure:  warm, open-minded and sympathetic when she learns about her granddaughter’s passion for her teacher and encouraging her to write about it.  It’s a different matter with Karin’s own daughter.  An extended, heated discussion between her and Kristin about Flashdance is not only funny but manages to suggest different, generational strains of feminism.  Karin liked the idea of Flashdance – a Hollywood movie heroine working as a welder in a steel mill – but hated what happened to turn that heroine into a conventional success story.  Kristin, a young child at the time, was exhilarated by the dance routines and distressed that her mother wouldn’t, for political reasons, just let her enjoy Flashdance.  They’re both still wedded to what divided them back in the mid-1980s; they get just as angry with each other reopening the argument now as they probably were forty years back.

Once Johanne’s memoir is accepted for publication, we see new sides to her mother and grandmother.  While Kristin is increasingly enthusiastic about the book and its prospects of success, Karin is more wary.  She accuses Kristin of being interested only in the possibility of commercial success, of not being sufficiently aware of how publicity and bad reviews could affect Johanne.  You can’t help wondering, though, if Karin’s circumspection also masks growing feelings of writing rivalry with her granddaughter.  Haugerud, who doesn’t convey much idea of what Karin’s poetry is like, is more exasperatingly opaque about the quality and the content of Johanne’s memoir.  As already noted, we’re unsure how much of her voiceover is reading from what she has written.  Although her mother and grandmother both mention the memoir’s candid descriptions of physical intimacy between Johanne and Johanna, there’s little in what we see, and nothing in what we hear, that seems to confirm this.

It may be safe to call Johanne’s book a work of autofiction, but how much or how little does it disguise the identity of the real people in the story that it tells?  Uncertainty about this crystallises in a meeting, at a café, between Kristin and Johanna – which is absorbing but raises even more questions.  This is a year or so after the events that Johanne’s manuscript describes, by which time Johanna is no longer teaching at the high school.  She’s nevertheless relieved when Kristin immediately assures her that she has no intention of ‘pressing charges’, in respect of Johanna’s relationship with Johanne.  Almost as soon as she has this assurance, Johanna turns self-serving and somewhat threatening.  She suggests that Johanne’s attentions were a kind of ‘abuse’ of her.  She thinks she’s being magnanimous when she tells Kristin she’s happy for the memoir to be published.  Part of the scene is accompanied by Johanne’s voiceover, taking offence at Johanna’s telling Kristin that Johanne ‘wasn’t her type’.  The conversation with Kristin ends abruptly when Johanna’s latest romantic partner arrives in the café.  This so definitely echoes the apartment scene between Johanne and Johanna interrupted by the arrival of Frøydis that you’re almost bound to interpret the café meeting as Johanne’s merely imagining it.

Johanne is present for her mother and grandmother’s debate of the pros and cons of the memoir being published.  Although she says much less during this exchange than either Kristin or Karin, Johanne speaks up when her mother describes the memoir as ‘a queer awakening’.  She asks, almost angrily, ‘Am I queer just because I fell in love with Johanna?’  Other than a short early scene between Johanne and a male student in the modern dance class, and the troupe in the Jacob’s Ladder fantasy, men are largely conspicuous by their absence from Dreams until the closing stages, when Johanne visits a male psychotherapist (Lars Jacob Holm).  She tells him she now has a boyfriend:  she doesn’t mention the boy’s name but he’s Thomas in the IMDb cast list; after the session with the therapist is over, Thomas (Valdemar Dørmænen Irgens) is waiting outside for Johanne.  They’re about to go to meet up with friends when she realises she’s left something behind in the therapist’s office; she goes back inside the building to get it, telling Thomas she’ll catch him up.

This last episode continues to erode the actuality of Johanne’s story.  She tells the affably inscrutable therapist about reviews and sales of her book, but you get the impression the memoir hasn’t in fact been published.  (She expresses mild irritation with what she sees as the therapist’s reductive approach, particularly when he suggests that her experience – she fell in love and wrote about it – is hardly extraordinary.)  Johanne still has the manuscript on a flash drive, which she produces from her shorts pocket for the therapist to see, and which falls out of the same pocket before she leaves the session.  It’s this that she goes back for, until something happens to change her mind.  A woman’s voice speaks to Johanne as she heads for the therapist’s office.  She looks round and it’s Frøydis, who asks if she’s still in touch with Johanna, then if Johanne fancies a coffee.  She says yes.  Dreams ends on a shot of Johanne and Frøydis walking away together.

Thomas, then, is easily dismissed from Johanne’s mind.  Was having a boyfriend, and Johanne’s describing to the therapist their physical intimacy, another fantasy on her part?  More important, once Frøydis appears on the scene, Johanne no longer feels the need to retrieve the flash drive.  She was surprised when the therapist, glancing at his watch, told her it was time to wind up the session, which he says has been going on upwards of ninety minutes – in other words, nearly as long as Dreams has lasted.  Has the whole film up to this point been a visualisation of what Johanne has been telling the therapist?   Dag Johan Haugerud gets excellent performances from all his cast, especially Ella Øverbye (not yet twenty when the film was shot).  As a storyteller, he plays clever and beguiling games.  By the end of Dreams, though, I was more aware of being involved in that gameplaying than I was engaged by the people in Haugerud’s story.

15 September 2026

[1] Although the film’s one-word Norwegian title translates as ‘Dreams’, Wikipedia, along with some other websites, refers to it as Dreams (Sex Love).  The words in brackets obviously acknowledge the other parts of Haugerud’s trilogy, but there was a practical reason for extending the title in Berlin:  another Dreams, by the Mexican director Michel Franco, was in the 2025 Festival programme.