The Trailer That Asked: What If Sex Was Just… Talking?
Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud just dropped the official US trailer for Sex, and it’s already melting brains—without showing a single naked body. In a media landscape where “provocative” usually means “NSFW,” Sex flips the script: it’s a film about intimacy, repression, and the politics of self-understanding, all unpacked through painfully honest conversations. The title may lure in the curious, but what they’ll find is something quieter—and way more subversive.
It’s like Bergman ghostwrote an episode of ‘Modern Love’. With chimney sweeps.
Yes, chimney sweeps. Two married men in Oslo—stoic, ordinary, dressed like they walked out of a folk tale—start having intensely personal reckonings with sexuality and identity. One has sex with a man… and tells his wife, insisting it wasn’t cheating. The other dreams of being a woman, triggering a spiral of existential dread. The trailer teases no eroticism, no cinematic fireworks—just loaded silences and open wounds.
Here’s the insane part: Sex is the first in Haugerud’s Sex Dreams Love trilogy. The second (Love) is already out; the third (Dreams) lands this fall. But Sex, by contrast, is a quiet riot. Less about seduction—more about dismantling everything you thought you understood about gender.
The Real Scandal? Men Talking About Feelings Without Exploding
This is a film about boundaries dissolving—not in bed, but in identity. And it lands differently in a post-Fleabag, post-Stutz, post-therapy-is-the-new-tattoo world. It doesn’t shout “representation!”—it asks who’s performing what to whom, and why?
It echoes works like Andrew Haigh’s Weekend or Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, but Sex is even more muted. There’s no crime, no climax, no catharsis. Just awkward, devastating honesty.
In an era where cinematic intimacy usually comes with a choreographed HBO sheen, Sex feels like eavesdropping on a therapy session you’re not supposed to hear. The way it weaponizes discomfort is… surgical.
The Oslo Trilogy Is Quietly Trolling the Entire Industry
The irony is almost too rich. Haugerud calls this an “Oslo Trilogy”—a nod, intentionally or not, to Joachim Trier’s own emotionally devastating Oslo Trilogy (Reprise, Oslo August 31st, The Worst Person in the World). But where Trier gives us dreamy montages and voiceovers soaked in existential yearning, Haugerud just… watches people talk. And talk. Until something breaks.
And here’s the kicker: Sex premiered at Berlin in 2024 with little fanfare. Now, with its US release set for June 13th (via Strand Releasing), it might finally get the attention it deserves—from people who thought they were getting softcore, and got psychoanalysis instead.
So—Is ‘Sex’ a Masterpiece, a Prank, or a Midlife Crisis on Film?
Would you pay $20 to watch two chimney sweeps emotionally implode over repressed desire?
No judgment. (Okay, some judgment.)
