You can call it bold, baffling, or just brutally honest, but naming your film Sex in 2024 is the cinematic equivalent of walking into a church with fireworks. Norwegian auteur Dag Johan Haugerud, known for his hushed, layered human dramas, opens his trilogy not with a whimper, but with a word that ignites eyebrows, triggers algorithms, and gets tangled in the sticky web of Google searches.
Yes, Sex is the first chapter of Haugerud’s Sex, Dreams, Love trilogy, a slow-burning exploration of identity, intimacy, and everything people only talk about in rooms with closed doors and dim lighting.
Inside Dag Johan Haugerud’s bold film gamble
Sex (2024), the first tender limb of his Norwegian trilogy Sex, Dreams and Love, is not a skin-deep foray into lust but a gaze into the murky backstreets of identity, desire, and long-repressed truths. Two married men, straight on paper, stumble into seismic questions about who they really are, shaking their heteronormative cages like ghosts trapped in IKEA wardrobes.
And while its title may read like the clickbait fantasy of a bored tabloid editor, the truth is far more vulnerable and much harder to market.
Speaking at the London Film Festival 2024, Dag Johan Haugerud gave a wonderfully candid, slightly rambling insight into the naming process:
It’s it’s the first the trilogy and the trilogy is called Sex, Dreams and Love and when you put this three words together you know it’s almost like they are expanding or they’re building on each other.
Haugerud tried to tie three emotional concepts into one narrative arc. He told us that s*x, as a standalone experience, is incomplete. But s*x interwoven with Dreams and Love becomes richer, more nuanced, almost alchemical.
Haugerud wanted all three films to be titled as a connected whole:
We should really call all the three films Sex, Dreams, Love one, two and three.
So, ideally, he wanted to title all three films in the trilogy as: Sex, Dreams, Love – Part 1, 2, 3. It would show how the trilogy is one big emotional and philosophical story: different perspectives on the same deep human questions.
The Producer’s practical choice: Splitting up the trilogy titles
The title Sex, which is the most honest and direct reflection of the film’s themes, is also the hardest to sell. But producers, perhaps wary of the word’s digital dodgeball, opted for different titles to keep things searchable and sellable. “Sex is not as easy to sell as you should think because it’s very, very hard to Google,” Dag Johan Haugerud confessed at the London Film Festival 2024.
Haugerud envisioned his trilogy as a conversation: three films, three lenses, same juicy subject matter. Inspired by the legendary Three Colours trilogy, he aimed for depth and nuance. According to Haugerud, Sex isn’t just about s*x; it’s about layering s*x with dreams and love, building on each other like the chapters of a novel. “S*x with dreams and love becomes much more than just s*x,” he said.
This term, despite its magnetism in tabloids and marketing clichés, is a nightmare for search engines. Try Googling s*x and see if you find a Norwegian indie drama or a million unrelated… well, distractions. The word is a digital minefield, making marketing a headache. So, producers thought to give each movie a different title to dodge the Google Bermuda Triangle.
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