Love (2025) Film Review: A Romantic Revolution

Love offers a probing, if staid, look at romance within Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy, focusing on conversation and reflection.

In the film’s opening scene, Marianne pragmatically – almost coldly – talks a devastated patient through his recent cancer diagnosis, while Tor offers a warmer presence from the sidelines. 

One summer night, the two unexpectedly meet outside of work on a ferry – Marianne returning from a bust of a blind date in the quest for a steady relationship, Tor noting the ferry is prime cruising ground. Soon, in their interactions with each other and their wider circle of acquaintances, they find themselves questioning their notions of love and connection and whether their paths will truly lead them to happiness. Marianne wonders what would happen if she relaxed and took on more casual flings – even casual sex. Tor balances the way past lovers turn into friends – or don’t – and finds his approach to life somewhat lacking when Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), an old psychologist, demands new emotional attachments of him. 

Like in Sex (the trilogy’s first film) and Dreams (its third), there is a gentleness to the presentation of events and characters in Love that celebrates the quotidian. The subjects of these films are thoroughly ordinary Danish professionals who, if not all middle class, are comfortable in their lives. Within this everyday safety and security, they can branch out towards self-actualisation. It is a huge testament to Haugerud’s scripts and the understated performances of Hovig, Jacobsen, and their co-stars in this movie and others that the films never take an insufferable navel-gazing turn.

Introspection is not always easy on film, and Love manages to present characters’ inner journeys naturalistically, without voiceovers or flights of fancy in the filmmaking, while avoiding tipping into a Girls-style parody of self-reflection. For every cynical reflection on the modern world, hope remains just around the corner. Marianne and Tor might find their worldviews challenged, but faith and discovery motivate them beyond resignation or capitulation to the status quo. 

The double standards men and women face in dating and casual sex provide some friction, and not every character – notably Marianne’s friend Heidi Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen) – is able to reach the enlightenment sought by the two protagonists (Heidi’s hypocrisy, portrayed with a gentle mockery rather than bitterness, is an interesting complication in an otherwise tranquil drama). On the whole, however, the film is far more concerned with interior journeys around perceived prejudices than it is around the direct portrayals of those prejudices in action. The result does not always feel realistic, per se – narrative fiction thrives on contrivances and speculation – but it feels real.

Unfortunately, promises and possibilities are the only lasting impacts of this otherwise impeccably crafted, admirably adult drama. Love does not have the world-changing stakes of Sex or the visual imagination of Dreams, and its narrative shortcomings thus seem more glaring. In press notes, Haugerud describes Love as “utopian”; “instructive” may be more accurate. There is little physical passion shown, though conversations about the meaning of love and partnership are rife. Sex is spoken of frankly, but without the act to understand how it physically impacts Tor and Marianne’s lives. There are only so many conversations that can take place in beautiful settings – galleries, sunlit apartments, drinking wine on a beautiful Nordic summer night in a luxurious cabin – before philosophy alone begins to feel empty. The medical stakes of life and death, while augmenting rather than centring character journeys, become the most urgent.

Love may be an interesting exercise in remove bordering on alienation, separating the theory of desire from the practice thereof; occasionally the effect feels irritatingly didactic, removing the mess and imperfection that makes humans continually and universally compelling subjects. After a while, it is hard listening to people talk about how they are reworking the rules of romance. Without the touch, taste, and heady tactility of love, Love’s revolutionary aims feel untested and unproven. Only the twinkle in Marianne’s and Tor’s eyes promises a better, freer future.

Love (Kjærlighet) will be screened in cinemas across the U.K. from 15 August, 2025. The U.K. theatrical release dates for the other two films in the trilogy, Dreams and Sex, are 1 August and 22 August. Visit Modern Films’ official site for the full list of screenings.