‘Dreams’ Review: Dag Johan Haugerud’s Intimacy-Themed Trilogy Concludes With Its Most Youthful, Delicate Chapter

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic The dynamic between student and teacher can be a charged, intimate one even in its most appropriate form: As children, we spend so much time with our educators, and are so dependent on their attention and approval, that the relationship can evolve into fast loathing or quasi-familial affection — an impression, either way, that often lives far longer in the memory than whatever it is they taught us.

For naive 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye), an instant affinity with her new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) begins with the similarity of their names, before she projects a far deeper emotional bond between them.

Or perhaps she isn’t projecting at all. Intricately shaded and unfailingly sensitive on a volatile subject, Dag Johan Haugerud‘s “Dreams” captures the disorienting bifocal lens of first love, where on the one hand, the world around you becomes a hormonal haze, while on the other, you see more clearly into yourself than ever before.

The light touch that Haugerud applies to hefty matters of the heart comes as no surprise in “Dreams,” the final instalment in the novelist-turned-filmmaker’s trilogy of films examining romance and intimacy in contemporary Norway.