Consent Puzzles in the Oslo Stories Trilogy by Dag Johan Haugerud

In France, Dreams, Sex and Love came out over three weeks in the summer of 2025. I was like a restless teenager in my discovery of these intricate, sustainable and secret worlds – breathlessly waiting until the next instalment for another revelation. To me, the triptych of films constitutes a utopian portrayal of consent in an ideal world, one in which consent is not based on power dynamics or gender and heterosexual norms but rather on desire and love. 

As I watched them, an interesting similarity between the three films struck me. I was confronted by the fact that they all contain what film scholar Michele Meek calls “consent puzzles”¹ – problematic moments around consent. The way she tells it, consent can be shown in two ways: the first is what people say/do (“performative”) and the second is what they think/feel (“subjective”). What Meek calls “consent puzzles” are what happens when one expresses consent verbally without the sentiment or vice versa. More problematic is subjective consent, which, like female pleasure, often remains invisible.² This poses a challenge to the filmmaker. How can the subjective, “feeling” aspect of consent be made explicit and what does it mean if the characters don’t voice their consent?

Meek’s focus on this conundrum came up in her study of American films, especially comedies. In her book Consent Culture and Teen Films, Meek notes that while “contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, and ensure date rape is no longer a joke”, films from the ‘90s and 2000s would often glamourise boys and men tricking women into sex. This mirrors my watching experience as a teenager growing up in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Often my friends and I would get together to watch American teen films, from American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999) to Dude, Where’s My Car? (Danny Leiner, 2001) These male-(gaze)-centric films were designed to appeal to teenage boys, but girls among my friends adopted their language, saying of one friend, “She’s just a cock teaser,” or accusing another of not “putting out.” At my all-girls school, discourse around sex started and ended with male desire. It wasn’t until I was parsing Meek’s book that I made a direct connection between the films we were watching and this skewed understanding of consent.

In films involving consenting adults, sex is very often portrayed either as a plot point – people get together and let’s see what happens next, or as a conclusion – they live happily ever after. When a grey area does emerge, characters rarely have the maturity to deal with it. 

Perhaps this is why watching these films gave me the feeling I was a teenager again. The lack of film education about consent I was given back then was being remedied week after week watching these Norwegian films in which women had agency over their bodies and minds. I’m not saying they portray some kind of ideal consent model – the characters in them are flawed, human and struggling just as much as anyone. But the whole point is that there is never one answer. Consent is just a constant negotiation between actors in this play we call the world. The people in these films talk, and they talk – a lot – about what consent means to them, how they negotiate it in their own minds, and how other people’s limits can surprise them.

In each film of the trilogy, a character is warned or questioned about crossing an invisible line. This comes up in a relationship between an employer and an employee; a student and a teacher; and a nurse and a patient. The characters all work out their consent puzzles on their own, without resorting to violence or institutional intervention. The careful consideration, exposure and eventual resolution of these consent puzzles is part of what makes these films so moving. They ask, how can one go into the dark woods of one’s desires without infringing on another’s freedom?

The films in the Oslo Stories Trilogy take on a broad definition of sexual consent. Dreams deals with consent to dream about somebody: just how far can those dreams go? Sex with consent around exclusivity in relationships, of both body and mind. The film Love deals with consent of the heart. How far can we go into finding out where our own hearts stop without hurting someone else’s?

Dreams plunges us directly into the world of a teenage girl. The main character is Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a sixteen-year-old living in Oslo with her mother. Spending the holidays at her grandmother’s chalet, Johanne is holed up at home one day alone with a sprained ankle when she comes across a book about a torrid yet tender relationship between a sixteen-year-old girl and her friend’s uncle. The descriptions in the book affect Johanne deeply. This “inciting incident” prepares us for the plot. It turns out to be a mise an abyme, because as soon as a new teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu), arrives at the school, she becomes the object of our protagonist’s budding libido. 

Johanne’s forceful, almost violently possessive desire for her teacher becomes a cinematic object – the sheen of sweat that shrouds her body, the lock of her gaze, the intensity of her presence as she follows her teacher around the school. Never before have I seen a teenage girl experience a wet dream in a film – that trope is usually reserved as comedic fare for films about and for teenage boys – but it happens to Johanne as she remembers evenings spent in her teacher’s company. Fantasy and reality often collide in Dreams, as in the teacher’s apartment where the two start meeting once a week. The place itself is dreamlike, with its colourful wool hanging from wooden beams like some kind of giant spider’s web (built by whom and to catch what is never quite made clear). But this is also the beauty of the story. It’s not so much about blame as it is about desire and forgiveness. Each glance, each touch of the hand, is explained in intimate detail through an extradiegetic running commentary from Johanne, whose thoughts reflect her doubts about this precarious relationship. Her inner passion is revealed only through her hopeful eyes.

Dreams

The homoerotic focus of the film is mentioned only briefly. When the mother says that her daughter’s story is a “queer coming-of-age story for our times” Johanne just looks scathingly at her. Gender is not so important as the lives of the people involved. The story Johanne writes to explain her first experience of falling in love is presented to her teacher, who has a different take altogether: she feels used by her student. We are also faced with the reactions of both Johanne’s mother and her grandmother. All these voices, all these different points of view weaving across the screen, and as far as we know, no sex has actually taken place.

In Sex, we see a middle-aged chimney sweep mistake David Bowie for God in a dream, a teenager with mediocre grades debate starting a YouTube channel so he’ll have a career after high school, an eccentric doctor tell her patients about the joys of sex during pregnancy: “Having two people inhabit your body is an experience like nothing else on earth.” Sex doesn’t hesitate to explore what remains unsaid in our society.  It’s also very static – everything is filmed up close, perhaps the intimacy of the camera designed to mirror the act itself.

The main plot revolves around a married man who surprises himself by having sex with a male client one day on a whim. The plot revolves around how his wife deals with this revelation. She argues that she never gave her consent for this to happen, while he claims that it was not cheating because he told her about it straight away. Her role in the film becomes to seek out the details of the act. For her, the betrayal revolves not around the principle, but the intimate detail, such as the look on her lover’s face as he orgasms. Haugerud isn’t afraid to show every part of the sexual act: he describes the organs, the liquids and the gaze of sex. It’s about the gritty mechanics rather than the “sanctity of marriage” mentioned by the husband. While the married couple has this discussion, the periodic table sits high on the wall behind them (the woman is a science teacher) as if to remind us that we are all part of nature.

In striking historical contrast, while neighbouring Sweden produced some of the most hardcore porn in the 1970s, when it famously became the second country in the world to legalise pornography, socially conservative Norway trailed behind on such laws. This divergence raises a question: did Norway’s delayed exposure to pornography allow for a more contemplative evolution of on-screen intimacy? Perhaps the current emergence of the excitingly tender “Golden Age of Norwegian Cinema”³ led by filmmakers like Joachim Trier, who made his own Oslo Trilogy, is partly due to this delay.

The third film in the trilogy is Love. Love deals with the medical profession and features the experiences of an oncologist (Marianne) specialising in the pelvic region, which in this film comes down to diagnosing prostate cancer all day. The men she speaks with are at their most vulnerable, often in shock at their diagnosis and unable to comprehend, in real time, what she is telling them. Haugerud makes careful use of this trope, highlighting their vulnerability and confusion. The soundtrack reflects their confusion; sharp, almost jagged music sounds out like surgical instruments clanging into their tray. 

In Love, a nurse (Tor) asks Marianne, his colleague, what she thinks about his visiting a patient whom he met casually in real life, about helping him with his shopping and checking up on him outside his role as a nurse. Marianne, in turn, asks Tor for his opinion about her accepting a dinner with a man she doesn’t actually want to get involved with. Though the former was asking a question to his colleague in her role as a doctor, Marianne’s reply shows that she considers such talk – these thin lines – not only on an institutional level but also on a personal level.

So who can give their consent, and in what circumstances? The answer can never be based on a category of person, whether they’re sick, healthy, introduced by a friend in common, or not, because it all depends so deeply on that person’s experience.⁴ Perhaps the most powerful film in the trilogy, Love, is a bittersweet portrait of people who have to give up some dreams, and even forgo some sex and love to live healthily. But ultimately, by letting go of dearly held ideals they get a better grasp of them, allowing them to live even more wholeheartedly. Haugerud shows us what happens when consent puzzles are explored fully and met with empathy and understanding.

Love

The films make up a triptych on modern consent in an ideal world. Norway is one of the richest countries in the world,⁵ and as a recent article published in The New Yorker concludes,⁶ healthy consent often depends on the socioeconomic situation of the people involved. Perhaps this is the reason that Haugerud is able to portray these consent puzzles so elegantly, because they are not only utopian, but in Norway a reality. Through a panoply of small interactions, the filmmaker questions how intimacy ignited through care begets questions of consent, beyond the ways our institutions have come to deal with them.

There is a key moment in Sex that widens the focus on sexual consent to let more light in. Father and son are walking down the street when two women hail them to their van to move a huge refrigerator up some steps to their front door. The men readily help, but after they part ways, the son admits to his father that he hurt his hand carrying the appliance. This injury sets in motion a series of doctors’ visits which will highlight both men’s vulnerabilities. The short scene could easily be forgotten if it weren’t for the consequences: the hand that keeps hurting beyond the take. These are questions all parents face: how can we keep our children safe in a violent world while allowing them to question the roles they are given to play? And the son does question: quipping to his father that the women did not even say “thank you” for the help, instead making vague generalisations about the men’s natural strength. Perhaps the message is this: it is only by admitting that we don’t have all the answers that we can truly teach consent. There is never only one question, and never only one answer. This portrayal of the consequences of our complicity is something unusual, and it renders this triple ode to desire and love a triumph.

Endnotes