Dreams

dir. Dag Johan Haugerud · 2024

Snapshot

Dreams (Norwegian: Drømmer; the film also circulates under the festival title Dreams (Sex Love)) is a Norwegian drama written and directed by Dag Johan Haugerud and released in 2024. It forms the third and most celebrated entry in Haugerud's loosely linked "Sex Love Dreams" trilogy, a triptych of standalone, dialogue-driven films set in contemporary Oslo and concerned with desire, intimacy, and the language people use to make sense of feeling. The film follows Johanne, a teenager who develops an intense infatuation with her young teacher, Johanna, and pours the experience into a written manuscript; when her mother and her grandmother — herself a published poet — read the text, the household's attention shifts from the romance itself to its literary worth, its truthfulness, and the question of whether such private material should be published. Dreams won the Golden Bear, the top prize at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, in February 2025, an unusually high honor for a small-scale, talk-centered Norwegian film and the event that established it as Haugerud's international breakthrough. Its reputation rests on a deceptively plain surface — voiceover, conversation, ordinary interiors — beneath which it conducts a sustained inquiry into how raw experience becomes art.

Industry & production

Dreams is a product of the Norwegian arthouse-production ecosystem, made through Motlys, the Oslo company long associated with Haugerud's work and with producer Yngve Sæther, and supported within the framework of Norwegian Film Institute public funding that underwrites most domestic auteur cinema. The defining industrial fact about the film is that it was conceived not as a single project but as one panel of a trilogy shot and developed in close succession, an economy of scale that let Haugerud reuse a creative team, a city, and a thematic preoccupation across three features. Sex premiered at the Berlinale's Panorama section in early 2024 and Love (Kjærlighet) screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival later that year, so that by the time Dreams reached Berlin's main competition in 2025 it arrived as the capstone of an already-visible body of work — a sequencing that almost certainly amplified its critical reception. The Golden Bear converted a regionally respected filmmaker into a festival-circuit name and triggered the international distribution and subtitled releases through which most viewers outside Scandinavia have encountered the film. Precise budget and box-office figures are not reliably documented in English-language sources, and I will not estimate them; the relevant point is that this is modestly budgeted, subsidy-supported cinema whose ambitions are artistic rather than commercial.

Technology

Dreams was made with contemporary digital cinematography, consistent with the naturalistic, available-light register of Norwegian narrative film of the 2020s, though the specific camera and lens packages are not widely published and I will not invent them. What matters technologically is restraint: the film makes no display of spectacle, visual effects, or formal apparatus. Its most important "technology," in a sense, is the recorded human voice — the film leans heavily on voiceover narration, so that sound capture and the post-production handling of narration carry as much expressive weight as any image-making tool. This is filmmaking that treats the camera and microphone as transcription instruments for language and behavior rather than as engines of illusion.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is patient, composed, and unshowy, favoring stable framings of domestic and urban interiors — kitchens, living rooms, classrooms, stairwells — and the muted northern light of Oslo. The visual approach across the trilogy has been credited to Cecilie Semec, a cinematographer associated with Haugerud's recent work; readers should note that detailed below-the-line attributions for the film are thinly documented in English, and I flag that uncertainty rather than overstate it. The look subordinates image to talk: compositions tend to hold characters in conversation, often in two-shots or loose ensemble groupings, allowing dialogue and performance to organize the frame. The camera observes more than it dramatizes, and its very plainness is a rhetorical choice — it asks the viewer to listen.

Editing

Dreams is cut for rhythm of speech and thought rather than for action. Scenes are allowed to run at the length conversation requires, and the film's signature structural device is the interplay between Johanne's retrospective voiceover and the images it accompanies, so that editing must continually negotiate the gap between what is narrated and what is shown. The result is a montage of remembering: the cut becomes a way of testing narrated experience against depicted reality, sometimes confirming it, sometimes quietly undercutting it. The specific editor's credit is not something I can attribute with confidence, and I decline to guess.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The staging is domestic and theatrical in the best sense — built around bodies in rooms, talking. Haugerud's mise-en-scène foregrounds the textures of ordinary middle-class Oslo life and the intergenerational household: the apartment shared or traversed by Johanne, her mother, and her grandmother becomes a chamber for debate. Blocking emphasizes proximity and withdrawal, the small choreographies of a teenager moving toward and away from adults. The teacher's spaces — the classroom, glimpsed everyday settings — are staged with a deliberate ordinariness that makes Johanne's transfiguring infatuation feel like an act of imagination imposed on the mundane.

Sound

Sound is central, because the film is, in large part, narrated. Johanne's voiceover — the spoken form of her written manuscript — is the connective tissue of Dreams, and the film's emotional and intellectual life unfolds in the tension between that interior literary voice and the comparatively flat surfaces of recorded reality. Diegetic sound is naturalistic and unobtrusive. Scored music, if present, is used sparingly; I am not able to confirm a composer credit and will not fabricate one. The dominant aural fact of the film is language itself.

Performance

Performances are the film's engine. Ella Øverbye anchors Dreams as Johanne, carrying both the on-screen behavior of an adolescent and the more articulate, retrospective consciousness of the voiceover — a doubled performance of feeling and of writing-about-feeling. The adult roles are taken by major figures of Norwegian stage and screen: Ane Dahl Torp as the mother and Anne Marit Jacobsen as the grandmother give the household debate its weight and wit, while Selome Emnetu plays the teacher, Johanna, the object of an infatuation the film keeps deliberately opaque. The acting register is naturalistic and conversational, calibrated to a script in which what people say — and how they hedge, argue, and reframe — is the principal drama.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Dreams operates in a reflexive, literary mode rather than a conventional dramatic one. Its ostensible plot — a teenage crush — is largely complete before the film's true subject begins, because the central action is interpretive: the reading, evaluation, and contestation of Johanne's written account by the women of her family. The film thus stages the act of criticism as drama. Its mode is essayistic and autofictional, organized around voiceover narration that frames the visible events as already-written, already-remembered. This produces a productive instability: the viewer is never quite sure whether to take Johanne's narration as transparent truth, adolescent embellishment, or conscious literary construction — and the film's most sophisticated move is to make that uncertainty its theme rather than a problem to be resolved. The dramatic stakes are epistemological and ethical: What did happen? Whose story is it? Can it be published without betraying its subject?

Genre & cycle

Nominally a romance and drama, Dreams sits at the intersection of several cycles: the queer coming-of-age film, the literary or "writerly" drama, and the talk-driven European art film. As queer cinema it treats a young woman's same-sex awakening with a marked absence of melodrama or crisis, declining the trauma plots that long dominated the genre. As a literary drama it belongs to a 2020s wave of films preoccupied with autofiction and the ethics of writing about real people — a cinematic counterpart to the Scandinavian literary culture of Karl Ove Knausgård and Vigdis Hjorth. Within Haugerud's own output it is one movement of the "Sex Love Dreams" cycle, films that share a city and a sensibility but not characters, each isolating a different facet of intimacy. Its festival-circuit success places it squarely within the contemporary arthouse cycle of intimate, conversation-led European features.

Authorship & method

Dreams is a thoroughgoing auteur work: Dag Johan Haugerud wrote and directed it, and his authorship is inseparable from his sensibility as a novelist and short-story writer. Haugerud, who has combined filmmaking with a career connected to libraries and literature, makes films that are unusually verbal, structured like prose, and interested in the moral and intellectual texture of conversation — qualities visible in earlier features such as I Belong and Beware of Children (Barn). His method is to build films from talk, to trust dialogue to carry meaning, and to use the trilogy structure as a way of examining a single human domain from multiple angles. Among his collaborators, producer Yngve Sæther and the Motlys company provide the institutional continuity, and the cinematography across the recent films has been associated with Cecilie Semec; as noted above, certain craft credits for Dreams are not robustly documented in the English-language record, and I have flagged those gaps rather than fill them with invention. The authorial signature is nonetheless unmistakable: a calm, intelligent, literary cinema in which ideas are dramatized through speech.

Movement / national cinema

The film belongs to a strand of contemporary Norwegian cinema that prizes the literary and the conversational. It is natural to place Haugerud in dialogue with Joachim Trier, whose The Worst Person in the World gave Oslo's articulate, self-examining milieu international visibility; but where Trier is romantic and kinetic, Haugerud is more austere, theatrical, and essayistic. The deeper lineage is European: the moral-tale tradition of Éric Rohmer, whose talky, ethically curious cinema of young people reasoning about love is the clearest ancestor, and the patient, reflexive registers associated with directors like Hong Sang-soo. Dreams extends a recognizably Nordic art cinema — restrained, interior, socially observant — while pushing it toward a reflexive interest in writing and authorship.

Era / period

Dreams is emphatically a film of the 2020s, set in a contemporary, secular, middle-class Oslo. Its concerns are legible against several period currents: the post-#MeToo sensitivity to power and consent that hovers, unspoken but present, around a student's feelings for a teacher; the autofiction boom in Scandinavian letters and its attendant anxieties about the right to use real lives as material; and a broader cultural normalization of queer adolescence that lets the film treat same-sex first love as a matter of literary and emotional interest rather than social scandal. The film's intergenerational structure — teenager, mother, poet-grandmother — also makes it a portrait of changing attitudes across three cohorts of Norwegian women.

Themes

The film's governing theme is the relationship between experience and writing — the way feeling is transformed, possibly falsified, certainly shaped, when it becomes text. Around this it gathers several others: first love and queer awakening, rendered without crisis; the unreliability of memory and desire; the ethics of autofiction and the question of who owns a shared experience once one party writes it down; and the intergenerational transmission of women's emotional and intellectual life. The debate over whether to publish Johanne's manuscript opens onto questions of artistic value versus private truth, and onto the discomfiting possibility that the literary quality of an account and its factual honesty may be at odds. Language itself — its power to elevate, distort, and lay claim — is the film's deepest subject.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, Dreams was received as the standout of Haugerud's trilogy and as a surprising, widely approved Golden Bear winner at the 2025 Berlinale, praised for its intelligence, its tonal control, and its unfashionable faith in talk and voiceover; reviewers frequently singled out the literary sophistication of its script and the strength of its ensemble, particularly the central performance and the grandmother–mother–daughter dynamic. The award conferred immediate canonical standing within recent Norwegian cinema and secured the film international distribution. Looking backward, its influences are clear: the Rohmerian moral tale, the reflexive literary cinema of conversation, and the contemporary Scandinavian autofiction that supplies its central anxiety; the Trier-era Oslo film is its closest domestic context. Looking forward, the film's legacy is still forming — it is too recent for a settled influence to be claimed honestly, and I will not overstate it — but its Golden Bear has plausibly strengthened the case, within festival culture, for quiet, dialogue-led, literary filmmaking, and it stands as a high-water mark for the Norwegian art film's international standing in the mid-2020s. Its most lasting contribution may prove to be its demonstration that a film about reading and writing — about criticism as drama — can hold an audience without raising its voice.