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There’s a lot to love about Love (or Kjaelighet), but the generic English title is not one of them. That handle will get this confused with works by Gaspar Noé and Judd Apatow, among others, and could potentially delay viewers finding it through search engines. Which would be a real shame, because Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s dramedy, which premiered at Venice, is a refreshing delight.

Honest, thoughtful, and daringly talky as it observes modern dating customs in the age of apps, it deserves further exposure beyond the festival circuit. The second part of a thematically but not narratively linked trilogy — its predecessor Sex played in Berlin, and Dreams is yet to come — it’s sure to find traction among viewers who groove to upscale, nuanced Scandi fare like The Worst Person in the World, the sort of romantic schmooze-fests that French cinema excels at and Richard Linklater’s Before series.

We live in a transitional era regarding relationship politics, as more people carve romantic and sexual lives for themselves outside the prescribed trajectory of love, marriage, procreation and nuclear family. The emergence of LGBT identities into the mainstream has had much to do with this, of course, but our collective understanding of opposite-sex partnerships — those once deemed merely “normal” — is evolving too, alive to the complexities of bisexuality and open relationships. Screen romance, however, remains largely behind this curve, which is why Dag Johan Haugerud’s new film “Love” feels, in its quiet, conversational way, rather radical: a tender, gently observed relationship study that places as much stock in casual sex as in seeking a soulmate. Following two very different medical professionals on their contrasting quests for intimacy, it’s the rare romantic drama that concedes one person’s happily-ever-after is not necessarily another’s.

The fourth feature by Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Haugerud,...

Sex is never just sex, says Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a middle-aged psychologist Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) meets on the ferry between central Oslo and Nakholmen, the island where they happen to have neighboring houses. Tor, a nurse who works with cancer patients, looks sceptical.

Tor has had a lot of sex, often generated by Grinder and occasionally on this ferry; it’s a thrill, he tells his colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), to do a search for the nearest person on the app and look up to see the person on your screen looking right back at you. Marianne gives it a try on Tinder and meets a man who tells her he is married. Does he feel guilty? Yes, extremely guilty! “You’ve ruined it a bit, now,” he says accusingly. Bjorn was right. Sex is never just sex.

Dag Johan Haugerud’s discursive film is a companion piece to his earlier Sex.