‘Sauna’: Sundance Review

Dir: Mathias Broe. Denmark. 2025. 105mins

Two worlds collide in Sauna, a melancholy queer love story that’s sensitively dealt with by first time function director Mathias Broe. The connection between a lonely homosexual man and his transgender lover serves as a backdrop to a nuanced exploration of need, longing and belonging. Competition programmers and specialist distributors must be interested in a title that has a Danish theatrical launch set for April 24 following its premiere in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competitors.

 A sombre, involving human drama

Broe’s brief movies embrace Younger Man’s Dance (2014) and Amfi (2018), the latter of which received Finest Documentary Quick on the Danish Movie Awards. His debut function is predicated on the novel by Mads Ananda Lodahl, written as a part of the writer’s purpose to confront the ’straight world order’ and discover a contemporary sexuality with extra fluid potentialities. The fabric has an affinity with Broe’s earlier work but additionally holds a private connection for the filmmaker, who has revealed that his personal accomplice has began transitioning.

Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) has left his household within the Danish metropolis of Odense to make a brand new life in Copenhagen. He works on the homosexual sauna Adonis and shares the house of its proprietor Michael (Klaus Tange). The sauna is a darkish labyrinth of need full with non-public cabins,  spy holes, porn movies and nameless encounters, all set to a soundtrack of moans and groans. Within the chilly mild of day, Johan sees a distinct facet of the enterprise as he cleans away the stains of the earlier night time.

Johan’s life is spent in golf equipment, bars and the sauna, with Copenhagen providing every little thing a sexy younger man might need from one night time stands to Grindr hook-ups. A real connection or intimacy is extra elusive till Johan meets William (Nina Rask) who’s transitioning to male. Romance begins to blossom, permitting Broe to discover the communities surrounding every of them. William isn’t welcome on the Adonis and instructed “this can be a place the place males come to have intercourse with males.” Johan initially receives a hotter welcome from William’s trans associates, however nonetheless manages to really feel excluded from their conversations and experiences. The moments they spend in one another’s worlds and Broe’s efficient use of close-ups underline how a lot it’s attainable to really feel alone in a crowd. 

Broe finds a way of pleasure within the rising closeness between Johan and William, particularly on a visit to the seaside after they really feel in a position to simply be themselves. It quickly turns into clear, nonetheless, that he’s not ready to take the straightforward route of a happy-ever-after ending by ignoring the person and wider pressures on their relationship.

Sauna makes appreciable calls for on its actors. Andersen, who beforehand co-starred with Rask in episodes of Danish tv drama Carmen Curlers in 2023, performs Johan as a naive, doe-eyed harmless adrift in a world of infinite potentialities. There’s a pet canine starvation to please in him, however nothing that grounds his life. The necessity for love virtually unhinges him, pushing him in the direction of behaviour that’s troubling and unsettling. Rask, a trans actor, makes William a extra distant determine who at all times appears barely much less invested within the relationship and cautious of dedication. His declare that he’s nonetheless making an attempt to know who he’s and what he needs might equally apply to Johan.

There’s a thoughtfulness and maturity to Broe’s method from the complexity of the central relationship to the avoidance of presenting a vacationer’s eye view of Copenhagen and the exploration of contemporary sexuality by means of fairly conventional storytelling. The result’s a sombre, involving human drama.