Two worlds collide in Sauna, a melancholy queer love story that is sensitively handled by first time feature director Mathias Broe. The relationship between a lonely gay man and his transgender lover serves as a backdrop to a nuanced exploration of desire, longing and belonging. Festival programmers and specialist distributors should be attracted to a title that has a Danish theatrical release set for April 24 following its premiere in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competition.
Broe’s short films include Young Man’s Dance (2014) and Amfi (2018), the latter of which won Best Documentary Short at the Danish Film Awards. His debut feature is based on the novel by Mads Ananda Lodahl, written as part of the author’s aim to confront the ’straight world order’ and explore a modern sexuality with more fluid possibilities. The material has an affinity with Broe’s previous work but also holds a personal connection for the filmmaker, who has revealed that his own partner has started transitioning.
Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) has left his family in the Danish city of Odense to make a new life in Copenhagen. He works at the gay sauna Adonis and shares the apartment of its owner Michael (Klaus Tange). The sauna is a dark labyrinth of desire complete with private cabins, spy holes, porn films and anonymous encounters, all set to a soundtrack of moans and groans. In the cold light of day, Johan sees a different side of the enterprise as he cleans away the stains of the previous night.
Johan’s life is spent in clubs, bars and the sauna, with Copenhagen offering everything a horny young man could want from one night stands to Grindr hook-ups. A genuine connection or intimacy is more elusive until Johan meets William (Nina Rask) who is transitioning to male. Romance starts to blossom, allowing Broe to explore the communities surrounding each of them. William is not welcome at the Adonis and told “this is a place where men come to have sex with men.” Johan initially receives a warmer welcome from William’s trans friends, but still manages to feel excluded from their conversations and experiences. The moments they spend in each other’s worlds and Broe’s effective use of close-ups underline how much it is possible to feel alone in a crowd.
Broe finds a sense of joy in the growing closeness between Johan and William, especially on a trip to the seaside when they feel able to just be themselves. It soon becomes clear, however, that he is not prepared to take the easy route of a happy-ever-after ending by ignoring the individual and wider pressures on their relationship.
Sauna makes considerable demands on its actors. Andersen, who previously co-starred with Rask in episodes of Danish television drama Carmen Curlers in 2023, plays Johan as a naive, doe-eyed innocent adrift in a world of endless possibilities. There is a puppy dog hunger to please in him, but nothing that grounds his life. The need for love almost unhinges him, pushing him towards behaviour that is troubling and unsettling. Rask, a trans actor, makes William a more distant figure who always seems slightly less invested in the relationship and wary of commitment. His claim that he is still trying to understand who he is and what he wants could equally apply to Johan.
There is a thoughtfulness and maturity to Broe’s approach from the complexity of the central relationship to the avoidance of presenting a tourist’s eye view of Copenhagen and the exploration of modern sexuality through quite traditional storytelling. The result is a sombre, involving human drama.