Critics reviews

Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex is the talkiest and least erotic instalment of the novelist turned film-maker’s Norwegian trilogy. A gentle exploration of masculinity, marriage and sexual orientation... Haugerud leans into sustained theatrical dialogue, stylised and stagey, yet loaded with emotional ambivalence.

Examining everything from gender identity and marital fidelity to the extent to which couples are obliged to share, this is certainly dialogue-heavy. But the conversations are drolly thought-provoking and the leads nicely vulnerable, while Cecilie Semec's summery cinematography is as spontaneously infectious as Peder Capjon Kjellsby's jazz-inflected score.

[Sex is] slightly more didactic and less humorous than its companions – but still very lively and full of ideas... [The film] is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

Although the pace slackens as the film unfolds Sex is an upbeat and often moving affair that comes to a satisfying conclusion despite the couples’ differences and recriminations.

Sex offers a refreshingly frank investigation of its ever-enjoyable and, still today, deeply controversial subject matter. This frankness, while novel, is also central to the discomfort Haugerud seemingly wants to provoke. This is achieved, remarkably, without sex itself once appearing on screen.

[Sex] isn’t failed by the quality of its talk, but by its simplistic structure and perspective... To make a social portrait of unspoken grievances, approach them via placid definitional hair-splitting, and finally offer little else than a quasi-mystic choir performance suggests that, as with the film’s aesthetic conservatism, Haugerud’s decision to approach modern love is a confused first draft.

The didactic and allegorical nature of “Sex” is plain enough. However, the movie’s irresolute finale is still disappointing, as Haugerud essentially lets his two male leads drift away without considering the implications of their newfound queer thoughts.

While “Sex” may be light on the act itself, the movie is deeply — almost spiritually — engaged in what it means to people, and why it plays such an outsized role in the way that we self-identify and see each other.

“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals.

Refreshingly ambiguous in its depiction of adult relationships, “Sex,” like “Love,” is brimming with conversation as its characters question their feelings and beliefs. Yet where the first film’s dialogue felt organic, probing, even seductive in its open-endedness, the talk here tips too often into slightly ham-fisted digressions.

[This] is a film teeming with ideas in which “sex,” both as an act and identity, is eruditely investigated in search of an unnameable essence.

If the style of [the film's] long, mostly static scenes isn’t exactly novel, it nevertheless indicates how Haugerud aligns his work within a certain arthouse tradition, which pays modest dividends throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.