Sex

It’s hard to understand how a romantic drama about tolerance could be so tone-deaf and ungenerous.

When the movie stays more on subject, it can be engaging, and it helps that cinematographer Cecilie Semec has a talent for mining the mundane act of people talking to each other for visual interest.

Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise and Thorbjorn Harr.

The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.

Haugerud’s sly comedy addresses various crises of modern masculinity with a light, humane touch, finding more curiosity than toxicity in its workaday characters -- and making a case for seemingly aberrant desires and impulses as an everyday fact of life.

This superbly acted drama’s refusal to serve up tidy epiphanies might leave you wanting more. But the inchoate nature of the central characters’ self-reflection is partly the point in a smart movie with a lot on its mind.

Heartfelt, well-acted, sophisticated, profound and refreshingly candid.

Certainly the ideas we have about our lives, the choices we make about the people we want to share our lives with, and the ways we use our bodies to express these choices are all inextricable from each other. It’s very unusual to see.

The way Sex approaches the debate seems more like a draft than a definitive work. [Full review in Spanish]

There is no sex in Dag Johan Haugerud’s movie [...] But it’s through these dialogue-heavy, seemingly uneventful scenes that the film manages to ask the right questions.