Not to fear: the three entries in Dag Johan Haugerud’s loosely-connected, soulful and amusing Oslo-set trilogy, “Sex Dreams Love,” can be viewed in any order. There’s no correct answer, but the first two released in the United States—“Love” and “Sex,” which debuted in May and June ahead of the third part’s Fall arrival—are thematically and aesthetically aligned, making for ambitious meditations on the follies of middle age and the search for the ethereal in a world of brick and mortar.

“Love”, the more episodic of the two, begins with the planning of a city-wide arts celebration highlighting an unconventional subject: sexual motifs hiding in plain sight, within local municipal architecture. The focus here is on tour guide Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), the best friend of the movie’s main character Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), a local heterosexual surgeon seeking domestic stability. Even before we meet the latter, Heidi’s pitch guides us towards a more open-minded and sexually vulnerable reading of what might otherwise seem mundane. There’s an intentional plainness to Haugerud’s conception of Oslo. Like the film, it is sexually charged but never titillating.

Marianne works alongside gay male nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), whose interest lies in casual Grindr hookups. Though primarily work acquaintances, their chance meetings on a local ferry leads to dreamlike conversations about their respective desires and approaches to sex and romance, which are gradually challenged as “Love” goes on. We see Marianne’s courtship with various men—among them, a geologist who studies the Earth’s changing history—until she finally experiments with a no-strings-attached approach. We also follow Tor’s sexual encounters in transient public spaces (like the isolated ferry). He chances upon a handsome but withdrawn older man, with whom love seems possible, but whose ailments take sex off the table.

The movie’s conversational nature makes for a deceptively comforting watch, aided by Haugerud and cinematographer Cecilie Semec casual visual approach, in which dialogue dictates the movie’s rhythm. Whether or not the characters realize it, their proximity to illness and mortality (much of the film takes place in a hospital) forces them to more closely consider what they might want out of life, in a secular society that increasingly rejects existence after death. Can one find meaning in desire, or just escape? Haugerud wrestles with this question through a series of gentle introspections, rather than the verbose declarations of a Hollywood rom-com. These meditations culminate in quiet and affecting dialogue scenes shot against gorgeous sunsets, which re-introduce luminous mysteries into the characters’ near-mathematical deconstructions of love and sex.

This climactic uncertainty pervades “Love”’s sister story, “Sex.” After using establishing shots of Oslo’s gruff, uniformed chimney sweeps—stoic caretakers of the city’s physical infrastructure—Haugerud and Semec switch visual modes to present a more wryly conceived tale of masculinity in crisis. In lengthy, drawn-out shots, a pair of rooftop workers find themselves on break in a bland, nondescript office, an unlikely venue for the subsequent charged confessions about gender and desire.

Both sweeps are family men with wives and teenage sons, and they both remain unnamed, a choice that gives the film the feeling of fable. One of them, the more cautious and secretly religious man (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream from the previous night, in which the gaze of gender-bending sex symbol David Bowie pierced his sense of being, looking at him “as if he were a woman.” This leads him to worry that his voice is an octave higher than usual, which doesn’t bode well for his upcoming choir recital. In an act of shocking bluntness, the other, more forthcoming man (Jan Gunnar Røise) immediately retorts with an anecdote from the previous day about how a male client approached him with a similar gaze of longing, resulting in them having sex. However, he doesn’t consider himself to be queer, or the act to be cheating in any meaningful sense, even if his wife (Siri Forberg), disagrees.  

Their trepidation and frankness combine in marvelously entertaining scenes of the men trying to navigate these issues with their spouses. The two male leads seldom spend time together over the course of “Sex,” but their intimate chat proves catalytic for the movie’s crosscut cross-examination of traditional gender and sexuality. As these come into increasing friction with more fluid notions of being, each man is forced to reckon with the tension of what this means not only for himself as an individual, but as a member of a family unit, and of a larger society with its own opinions and prejudices—whether against sexual exploration or religious belief.

As he does in “Love,” Haugerud eventually doubles back to a series of increasingly vulnerable conversations at “golden hour,” this time at sunrise. But Haugerud is not content with repeating himself, and so the movie’s most important conversations happen through music and the arts—venues for more varied expression of the self. The aforementioned choir performance takes on an especially florid form that magnifies its Bowie-inspired notions of non-traditional masculinity. In the previous film, dusk brings about reflections on mortality. Here, dawn yields rebirth. 

Neither “Love” nor “Sex” comes to easily-digestible conclusions about the search for self, or the scramble for concrete footing in a shifting social landscape. Over the course of each movie, Haugerud transforms the meaning of Oslo’s modern skylines, imbuing concrete with infinite possibility. Disbelief in divinity and doctrine has long coincided with acceptance of wider spectrums of gender and sexuality, but Haugerud’s films are less interested in this political dynamic than in the emotional impetus behind searching for answers to one’s existence. In the absence of religion, where do people direct their “faith” when engulfed by personal, internal chaos?

By the end of each movie, skin glistening in the sun begins to feel less like the calculated product of cinematography, and more like a magical apparition with the power to make flesh feel divine. Coming to terms with one’s own complexity, Haugerud seems to suggest, is our age’s form of religious enlightenment.

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