As fascinating the trilogy of Dag Johan Haugerud, Norwegian director who over a year presented three films on feelings, human relationships and social standards. He started at the Berlin 2024 Festival with Sex, then he always continued in the same year at the Venice Festival with Love and in 2025 he returned again in competition to Berlin with Dreams, where the film won the most prestigious prize, or the gold bear.

Haugerud then closes in the realm of dreams (even if the “vision” order declared should be “sex, dreams and love”), with a very soft light that the first thing he does is caress and lift up above a cloud, there on the sky. This is how the very high feeling is manifested, so abstract as to be almost empty, central palpitation of a film inscribed in the desires, in the areas of confinement, in the verticality of the buildings, of the climbs, of the descents.

Dreams, the plot and what the film is about

To speak to us is the teenager Johanne (Ella Øverbye), who turns to us with a torrential confession (Haugerud before being a director was novelist and here it is perhaps more than in the other two films), excited, confused. It is she who has fallen in love, but not of a schoolmate or any peer. She fell in love with her French teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Already starting from this almost homonymy things are obviously complicated, indeed intricate and unsolvable, because the heart is not commanded but Johanne is consumed by the impossibility of the confession of her mood obviously of the teacher, but also to her mother (Ane Dahl Torp) and the maternal grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen).

The girl runs and corrodes herself between fantasizing and mental trips common to a teenager in love. Dreams, which is clear in the gaze and delicate and attractive in the forms, translates into cinematographic grammar that feverish euphoria of the love manifestation. While the protagonist speaks and tries to rewind the threads of a proximity to the teacher searched at all costs and then vented through the mediation of the written card when Johanne throws down a draft story, also move on the bottom doubts and ambiguity, which certify how this is a film also on the unreliability of the love report, a form that has too much to do with poetry and too little with the prose.

The city, between drives and tensions

Behind his marked verbosity, Haugerud’s work also sinks into the intertwining between the inner feeling and the context in which the characters live. The director of the director settles on an urban background ‘Smart -Tech’ typical of some cities of northern Europe – such as Oslo, where Dreams is set – in which reinforced concrete and steel disappear behind mirrors and reflections that form an irresistible reticulate of drives and vertical tensions, fed by the neo -jazz of the musical column of Anna Berg, which is the very substance of a fantasy of a fantasy, Almost erotic.

And the urban planning of a similar city, however, maintains a sense of immediate proximity to nature, parks, woods and forests that open lush over the course of two steps. Haugerud immerses himself as to describe the way in which the metropolis and what surrounds it are the representation of a large body calibrated between contraction and decompression. And where the green, a color that returns several times in the film, is designed for the release of those apnea internal to the individual who in the natural place disperse heat and reconnect to thought. In Dreams, which, among its different trajectories, is also the story of three women and three generations in comparison, this is however the prerogative of a more advanced, more wise, more sailed age, if not also resigned but not without a humor that emerges bittersweet here and there.

Because falling in love is a tremendously serious matter and in situations such as the one in which Johanne is tangled can also lead to equally serious results, which Dreams in his grays contemplates as a possibility when someone shields himself from the responsibilities with unexpected tough face. But to this infatuation Haugerud assigns a high value that never flows into the apocalyptic, leaving it rather dance between the sensations and among the warm moods of an alchemical art in continuous translation, without formulas and without masters.

Dreams will be released in Italian theaters on March 13th.

VOTE: 7.5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmspz330nie