The Gay Sauna: Where Desire and Exclusion Collide

We dive into the sultry steams of Adonis, Copenhagen’s gay sauna. “Sure,” Johan answers somewhat blankly to his friend William’s question about whether trans bodies are welcome there. In the dark rooms—the camera visibly struggles with the dim lighting—men search for anonymous sex, for fleeting homoerotic touch. Yet it quickly becomes clear that one rule is unambiguous: only cis men. Soon after, William is escorted out of the sauna.

With his feature debut, Sauna, an adaptation of Mads Ananda Lodahl’s novel, Danish director Mathias Broe tackles highly current debates. The film examines the notion of masculinity within the queer community—and who belongs and who is excluded. Subtly, the film probes a widespread fear of trans powers that can function as anti-patriarchal; and a male-masculinity cult within gay subcultures that aggressively pushes trans bodies out of supposedly open spaces like the gay sauna.

A Symbol of Youthful Loneliness

From Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) we only learn fragments—a handsome, fragile twink who fled his parents for Copenhagen. Yet even the big city grants him no home: loneliness threads through his life, physical closeness in Adonis leaves him emptier than before. The most striking manifestation of this feeling appears in a memory he narrates, which immediately becomes a performance: an unrequited crush on his best friend, secret masturbation in the sea, the fish that swallow his semen. This scene is more than an awkward-intimate moment—it becomes the emblem of his youthful loneliness, a longing that finds no counterpart and burns him even in retrospect.

What’s interesting about the film’s focus is where it chooses to look: it tells less from trans perspectives, with William (Nina Rask) staying on the margins. Instead, Broe foregrounds the reaction of the gay cis man to the trans struggles of his Grindr hookup and later partner. Yet one sometimes wishes for a bit more space for William: How does he experience the rejection, what goes on inside him? The critique of cis male saviorism remains superficial—Johan’s paternalistic urge to “save” feels uncomfortable at times and isn’t sufficiently reflected: Why must he necessarily “save” William?

Two Young People in Search of Themselves

It becomes clear quickly: both characters are searching for themselves. As their relationship fractures, William realizes he is only at the beginning of his identity journey. Johan, too, wrestles with a self that seems to slip away from him. The film constructs a double binary: William as a trans man with affluent parents providing security; Johan as a poor, support-strapped Twink. A contrast between economic stability and gender identity—two distinct but parallel self-discovery processes. The quiet, precise performances of the leads carry this tension.

Formally, however, the film often feels awkward. The sauna and sex scenes literally dissolve into darkness, and the camera flails at lighting. The script clings too rigidly to a three-act structure, making conflicts appear overly contrived. Supporting characters are pale, more symbols than people. The motif of sugar daddies, which fits well within themes of poverty, hypercapitalism, and hypermasculinity, isn’t consistently developed.

A Brutal Look at Gay Masculinity
The film’s strongest moments are when it treats the sauna as a stage for negotiation: a place where desire, exclusion, and body politics collide. It offers a luscious, yet unsparing look at gay masculine images—and the empty space into which trans people are pushed. It shows who is excluded, and how urgently debates about body images, desire, and belonging must be carried forward.

At the same time, Sauna makes clear how differently people’s relation to self-acceptance can be. Johan can love William as he is—but William himself struggles with a body that does not align with his sense of self, and with barriers in a system that makes hormones and surgery hard to access. The love story becomes entangled in a contradiction: the need to live openly as a trans person, and the partner’s wish to show that love unconditionally. Two desires that should not have to conflict, yet in a society that hierarchizes identity, inevitably collide.