Sauna

Watched at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Far away from being an masterpiece but director Mathias Broe created a honest tale of sexuality, transgender identity, and romance without feeling stereotypical or forced. Placed with great camerawork and sound designs, Broe offers some interesting writing that explores it's themes pretty well that offers a good insight to the characters and purpose. Alongside with the good performances and dialogue from the cast members, Broe understands identity and conflicted romance, which creates an engaging fest of love, entertainment and observation.

Broe is still in need of some learning as certain structures felt a bit slow. Especially with certain character decisions that are questionable and weird, which made some of the purpose of its themes and concepts feeling a bit out of place and unsure of itself. But Broe succeeds with his first debut.

Johan (a very hot Magnus Juhl Andersen) works at a men-only sauna in Copenhagen. He easily gets hookups, but may be interested in longer-term intimacy. Inattention to the Grindr profile nets him William, an early-stage F-to-M trans university student, and they actually make it a relationship. However, Johan is prone to impulsive acts, which lands him into trouble. Johan may also have trouble fitting into the trans community, and misses being penetrated by actual men. William, meanwhile, has trouble convincing the Gender Identity Clinic that he wants to transition from a straight woman to a gay man.

I saw this at the Inside Out film festival, and it was useful to discuss it afterwards. We settled on the "T" party being "trans", whereas for a different movie it could have been "testosterone".