lucky cola Sauna Review: Mathias Broe’s scorching, searching debut holds nothing back

Still from Sauna Photo: Sundance Film Festival Still from Sauna Photo: Sundance Film Festival

In his feature debut, Sauna, Mathias Broe burns a laser focus into chasms among sexual and gender identities, sharpening flailing tragedy of incomprehension. Efforts, endeavors which one might think of as earnest could be entirely misplaced. There might be a vast abyss between projected empathy for another’s ordeal and their daily lived experience. Sauna peers unsparingly into this.

The twenty-something Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) moved from his home in Odense to the capital Copenhagen where he works at a gay sauna, Adonis. A string of empty hook-ups takes up his days and nights. Groping in the anonymous, cavernous dark of the sauna, a thrill of immediate sexual ecstasy is satiated but these are fleeting encounters, only a sequence of orgiastic moans and slaps. He yearns for a lasting, emotionally invested connection. It seems elusive until William (Nina Rask), an online date, walks into his flat.

It’s only when William requests him not to touch his chest, that the former is a trans man dawns on Johan. William tries to back off, amusingly asking him whether he even went through his profile. However, something clicks in Johan. He urges him to stay, adding he’s never been with a trans guy before. An appeal for another kiss inaugurates between them a relationship of curiosity, passion and damage.

Nina Rask and Magnus Juhl Andersen Photo: Sundance Film Festival Nina Rask and Magnus Juhl Andersen Photo: Sundance Film Festival

A gulf in understanding looms intensely. It threatens to hijack the relationship at any given point. William is on a hiatus from his studies. He is saving up for a gender-affirming surgery and Johan gets sucked into helping him. The latter is convinced whatever he’s doing is solely with the best of intentions for William. Therefore, every seemingly over-reaching act, slippages in approach should be let off the hook. He steals at his workplace and gets thrown out of his convenient flat arrangement with his sugar daddy. Isn’t he so keen in his support? Why can’t William or his friends see and appreciate it? Such mental self-framing traps Johan, puts invisible walls in between the two. His inadvertent savior syndrome becomes a smokescreen for his own inner journey of reckoning. Unmoored as he has been, William’s complex circumstance gives him a glimpse of purpose, something he could channel his energy into and latch onto.

Still from Sauna Photo: TrustNordisk Still from Sauna Photo: TrustNordisk

William insists time and again he needs time and due consideration. He is in a fraught process of figuring out how to be what he is. He might not as outwardly thrust himself into the relationship, but at least he is honest about his place. Even though he might love Johan as well, there are several battles he has to fight, his own personhood to sort out first before fully binding himself to the romance. Transitioning is his present, all-embracing reality, pushing everything else to belated margins.

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As a filmmaker, Broe has no sanitizing timidity, or a cautionary, twitchy impulse that stifles artists from plunging into the mess. Adapting from Mads Ananda Lodahl’s eponymous book and having co-written the screenplay with William Lippert, Broe goes all the way in, unhesitant and uncompromising. An early scene sets the context of exclusion that Johan feels amidst William and his community. He takes William to the sauna, a space that is safe and easy for him to inhabit. But it isn’t one for William. The moment he steps in, he feels self-conscious, at a point of being edged out. Just minutes into intimacy, William is ordered to leave. He’s not welcome here. Trans phobia is unmistakable in the underlining of Johan’s boss that the sauna is just for gay men. Broe indicates it as pervading most spaces of hypermasculine gay meeting-points. Johan’s wrestling is one of de-linking from, outstripping received notions that swim in transphobia and biphobia. Difference in gaze, situational understanding, what it demands to just occupy one’s embodied selfhood linger like a sore ache, exerting on the lovers’ dynamics. Their dreamy spell of love and seaside idylls are shaded at the ends with inevitable, churning tussle of practical delineations.

Needless to say, Sauna rides on the heat and ache and push-pull its leads generate, especially Andersen’s ferocious, indelibly fearless performance. Broe stages their intimacy with unflinching erotic charge, a tactile sensuality accompanied by the pulsating human. Equally registers does the steady, skulking emotional aloofness, oozing from insecurities, bitterness and anguish over being cast aside. Some later scenes in this escalation feel a tad of a retread but Broe sustains a smarting electricity in his handling. Though Sauna unfolds from Johan’s perspective, it’s watchful, ensuring William steers the way of sexual intimacy. Castigating reflection refracts Johan’s narrative privilege. Nicolai Lok’s camera stays tightly close throughout, arresting Johan’s vivid hunger, stormy desperation and veering uncertainties, every note awake in Andersen’s performance. I haven’t felt so seen or heard in a film when in a scene Johan recounts the moment he discovered his queerness, its immediate upshot. Sauna lights a blaze. It’s unforgettable.

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Debanjan Dhar is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.

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